One more reason to home-school your children?

Updated - June 17, 2010

It happens with alarming frequency in the United States. Adults - who should know better - panic and accuse a student of violating a "zero tolerance" policy that bans weapons from a school. Except that the "weapon" is a toy.

And in this case, it's not even a toy gun. It's a LEGO. The item in question measures less than two inches in length. No reasonable person could ever confuse this with a real weapon, or even a kid's toy gun.

Despite these obvious facts, this Staten Island, NY school principal not only confiscated the poor kid's LEGOs, she actually reported this incident to the U.S. Department of Education. And of course, the Federal bureauracracy wasted your tax dollars investigating and responding to this "incident."


Now, no one wants to allow real weapons in any school. We all agree that would be dangerous and undesirable. Some would say unforgivable. But that is not what we're talking about here.

So let's recap: A fourth grader brings Legos to school and plays with them at lunch, with his frends. The school principal, apparently having nothing more important to do, seizes the LEGOs. She then files an official report with the Federal government.

While we fully support schools' attempts to remain weapons-free zones, we cannot condone the complete rejection of common sense that seems to accompany this movement. Public school officials who demonstrate this rather amazing lack of judgment may be better off pursuing a different, less stressful, career.

And here is the latest example of this lunacy: Yet another school humiliates a student, claiming that toy soldiers are weapons. This young man wanted to honor members of our military as patriots, but the school says, "inappropriate." These school officials are buffoons, and deserve to be ridiculed as such.