The little snowflakes were traumatized by words.
When Collinswood Language Academy students came home upset by their principal’s comments at an anti-gun walkout event Friday, several parents suggested they might be overreacting.
Then a 90-second video shot by a student made the rounds. It shows Principal Jennifer Pearsall talking about how much she loves to shoot clay pigeons.
“I’m a sharpshooter. I am right eyed and left handed,” Pearsall says, cocking her left thumb and forefinger in a gun gesture. When a voice from the audience asks if she shoots with a gun or a bow and arrow, Pearsall replies, “A rifle. Bam, bam, bam! Shootin’ clays. I love it.”
Student organizers say Pearsall interrupted a guest speaker to riff on gun culture, describing how when she was in school young hunters drove up with their rifles openly displayed.
“And it wasn’t a problem. And we weren’t worried about the safety,” Pearsall says in the video. “They were out doing their sport that their daddies had done and their granddaddies had done and their great-granddaddies had done on the land that they grew up on. We don’t want to change that. That is American culture.”
Collinswood, a K-8 Spanish-English magnet school in south Charlotte, was among several schools in the Charlotte region where students worked with administrators to participate in the National School Walkout, held on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting. It was one of three student-led mass events held in the aftermath of the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High to demand safer schools and call for gun restrictions that might avert attacks.
Sydnee Fryer, a 14-year-old organizer of the event, said Pearsall was supportive and enthusiastic. But she and her classmates were “a little bit weirded out” by Pearsall’s remarks on gun culture.
“I thought it was the most bizarre thing I had ever seen,” Sydnee said Monday.