Piers Morgan goes pro-gun? CNN host defends boys booted for toy guns

Internationally known anti-gun CNN television host Piers Morgan actually came out in strong defense of two Virginia teenage boys who were booted from school Tuesday for playing with toy guns in their front yard while waiting for the morning school bus.

“I’ve had quite a strong view of gun control,” he said at the tail end of an interview with the two boys, Khalid Caraballo and Aidan Clark, and two of their parents, Solangel Caraballo and Tim Clark, on Tuesday evening’s broadcast.

“But in this case,” Mr. Morgan said, “I think the school’s gone a bit far. This is a toy gun. When I was a chap, I used to play with toy guns.”

He then said that toy guns couldn’t “hurt anybody” and that the school had gone overboard by suspending the two teens.

“I think the school should reverse this,” Mr. Morgan said,  “and I think you should go back to school and try and bash some common sense into this.”

The two teens are in the seventh grade. Khalid said he was in his front yard at the time he was playing with his Airsoft toy gun, which fires tiny, spring-loaded plastic pellets. His friend Aidan had joined him in the play, and while both boys admitted to Mr. Morgan they were wrong, they also explained the reason they were wrong was because their parents told them not to play with the guns.

The boys’ parents, meanwhile, expressed outrage to Mr. Morgan that the school would see fit to discipline their children for actions performed on their own private property.

Mr. Morgan called the school’s punishment “hefty” and said the boys were “heavily punished here.”

On Tuesday morning, Larkspur Middle School in Virginia Beach suspended the boys until June of next year, The Huffington Post reported. They also face possible expulsion over what the school deemed as possession, handling and use of a firearm. School officials said in The Huffington Post that their bus stop is technically on school grounds, giving administrators the right to discipline them.