Is there a boy who hasn’t pointed his finger like a gun and pretended to shoot?  From KOCO :

OKLAHOMA CITY — Mid-Del parent Lydia Fox said Tuesday her 7-year-old son was suspended Friday for fidgeting in class.  Fox said her son, Patrick Riley, who is in first grade at Parkview Elementary, was asked to go home after he formed a gun with his hand and started to pretend he was shooting at a wall.

Naturally, school officials offer a more sinister version.

Parkview Elementary said in an official statement that “a student has repeatedly used his hands to simulate a gun and act as if is shooting fellow students.”

However, Riley said he did not point his make-believe gun at anyone.

Mind you, this is a first-grader we’re talking about.  Is it really critical whether he was “shooting” at fellow students or a wall?  After all, there’s no evidence his finger was loaded.

My memories of those years are filled with drawing pictures of bloodshed and mayhem.  The preference back then, at least among my crowd, was to color images of G.I.’s shooting their World War II enemies, and cowboys slaughtering indians.  Tanks, bazookas and flamethrowers were huge.  We grew adept at drawing explosions and dying bodies littering the ground.  When we couldn’t draw, we played games on the playground that involved “killing” as many of our classmates as possible under any number of guises. 

Were we terrorists?  No.  We were kids.  We did what kids do.  It was called imaginative play, and adults thought that it was good that we used our imagination to pretend things that weren’t.

In a bizarrely inexplicable and convoluted way, it’s understandable that school officials connect up tragedies like Columbine with first graders behaving like, well, first graders.  The theme of guns is the common thread, and well-intended but misguided bureaucrats find it easier to apply overarching rules as a palliative to communities to show that they are effective public servants.  Our old friend, zero tolerance, plays well with those who possess a ten second attention span.  Sighs of relief are heard all around whenever a school invokes a policy that protects students from themselves.

But when, as here, the ramifications of knee-jerk policies come out, their absurdity cannot be denied.  Rather than protect anyone from Patrick Riley’s finger, the school has turned a first-grader into a trouble maker at best, a future farmer terrorist at worst.  Perhaps this young man would grow up to cure cancer or invent Mr. Fusion, but will now be directed toward vocational classes for those inclined toward finger violence and denied the opportunities he would otherwise enjoy.

“One of the things I’ve always been able to brag about Oklahoma is that common sense still rules here. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can say that anymore,” Fox said.

Fox said she met with the school principal on Tuesday. She said they decided to “agree to disagree” on the matter.

Agree to disagree about what?  Whether Patrick Riley is a danger to society?  Whether Patrick’s finger should be registered as a deadly weapon?  Whether the principal is a compliant fool who would happily sell out a child over nonsense to adhere to an official policy that defies reason?

In the meantime, Fox learned an important lesson about “common sense,” one that I’ve harped on insufferably here.  There is no such thing.  For all those nice people who believe that the implementation of simplistic and inflexible rules will somehow be moderated by the application of “common sense,” thus relieving them of the consequences of such ridiculous applications as this, welcome to Oklahoma.  No, it’s not OK.

Most of us have the capacity to distinguish between things that have even the slightest potential to threaten the welfare of students.  What troubles me is that the few who don’t manage to land themselves well-paying jobs as school administrators.  It really sucks to be a kid these days.