> It was not unhead of to witness security hauling off weeping children who had the audacity to pull out a mechanical pencil.

"Hauling off" is obviously just an exaggeration, but mechanical pencils worked fine with scantrons and that's what I used starting in 3rd or 4th grade (maybe earlier, that's the earliest I recall using mechanical pencils). The author is apparently unaware of the fact that "number 2" is a reference to the grade of the graphite and not to a specific non-mechanical pencil.