America's newest crime: killing dinosaurs with imaginary guns

It’s been a while since we had a bracing dose of zero-tolerance insanity from America’s loopy educational system.  Take it away, NBC News in South Carolina!

A 16-year-old Summerville High School student says he was arrested Tuesday morning and suspended after writing about killing a dinosaur using a gun.

Alex Stone said he and his classmates were told in class to write a few sentences about themselves, and a “status” as if it was a Facebook page.

Stone said in his “status” he wrote a fictional story that involved the words “gun” and “take care of business.”

“I killed my neighbor’s pet dinosaur, and, then, in the next status I said I bought the gun to take care of the business,” Stone said.

Stone says his statements were taken completely out of context.

“I could understand if they made him re-write it because he did have “gun” in it. But a pet dinosaur?” said Alex’s mother Karen Gray.”I mean first of all, we don’t have dinosaurs anymore. Second of all, he’s not even old enough to buy a gun.”

Ms. Gray is too indulgent; it would still be unbearably stupid to make a 16-year-old rewrite an essay simply because it contained a reference to a gun.  Guns exist; they will not cease to exist because students are forbidden to mention them; differentiating between responsible ownership and gun crime is essential.  

These thought-control exercises are getting increasingly weird.  I’m not sure what the point of having students that age write up faux Facebook status updates about themselves was to begin with.  But at the point where the young man is arrested and suspended because he wrote about using an imaginary gun to shoot a dinosaur, we’ve gone completely off the rails.

According to the story, the teacher flipped out after reading of the dinocide, and contacted the school administrators, who called the police, leading to an unpleasant scene where the student’s bag and locker were searched for weapons, and he supposedly became “disruptive.”  What’s “disruptive” is messing up a kid’s life over something like this, while teaching the student body that their neurotic school administration has lost all sense of perspective and discretion.  I suppose staging Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” as the school play is out of the question.