AUSTIN, Texas, July 15 (UPI) -- A Texas legislator would deny federal funding to any public school that punishes a student for simulated gun play with pencils or pastry, his new bill states.
Republican Congressman Steve Stockman calls H.R. 2625, the Student Protection Act, "a bill to protect the rights of children," and specifies denial of funding to any public school that punishes children for drawing pictures of guns, pretending to possess a gun or "brandishing pastry or other food which is partially consumed in such a way that the remnant resembles a gun."
The bill, which enumerates situations in other states in which elementary school children were suspended from class for actions including the throwing of an imaginary grenade and shaping their fingers in the form of guns, would also deny aid to any school punishing a child for "using a pen, pencil or other writing utensil to simulate a firearm."
In Stockman's first term as a Texas legislator, 1995-1997, he wrote a magazine article claiming the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, was part of a plot to ban assault weapons, the Courthouse News Service reported.
