Our schools have gone crazy

By Libby Spencer

This is what happens when we allow fear to dictate our lives. A junior high school kid is kicked out of school for drawing a gun. No, I don't mean pulling a gun out of his bookbag, I mean literally drawing a gun.

Officials at an Arizona school suspended a 13-year-old boy for sketching what looked like a gun, saying the action posed a threat to his classmates. The boy's parents said the drawing was a harmless doodle and school officials overreacted.

Chandler district spokesman Terry Locke said the crude sketch was "absolutely considered a threat," and that threatening words or pictures are punishable.

I don't know about you, but as long as I've been alive, boys have been drawing pictures of guns and dead bleeding bodies and car crashes and other horrible scenes of monsters and mayhem without going on killing sprees in their later life. This kid just drew a gun, and it wasn't even a particularly good sketch. One might have thought it was some kind of spaceship if you didn't know what it was ahead of time.

This is part of a disturbing trend in schools where kids are being regularly punished for "thought crimes" that in past generations would have considered a rite of passage. Small wonder kids have no respect for authority when their school officials make such a mockery of the phrase that used to define this country -- land of the free and home of the brave.

(Cross-posted at The Impolitic.)