The World has finally gone completely insane.

I was reading through Dick Puddlecote's Link Tank today when I followed one of his links.

A ten year old boy has been suspended from school for using a firearm.

Now in fairness to the school, they have a policy which states

Zero Tolerance policy for “Weapons, Ammunition and other Hazardous Items,” the district prohibits the possession of “weapons,” defined as including any “knife, cutting instrument, cutting tool, nunchaku, firearm, shotgun, rifle and any other tool, instrument or implement capable of inflicting serious bodily injury.”

I suppose this is fair enough, as someone discharging a submachine-gun in class can be quite distracting.

So which firearm was this boy using, you ask? 

Well, it wasn't actually a firearm, it was a bow and arrow.

Aha, you say, they can be quite dangerous in the wrong hands.

But in this case, the bow and arrow didn't exist.  It was an imaginary bow and arrow.

So the bottom line is that a school suspends a pupil for nothing more than "possessing" a pretend imaginary bow and arrow.

When I was a kid, Cowboys and Indians was a popular game.  We spent our time shooting each other, sometimes with our fingers, sometimes with guns we made ourselves out of bits of wood and sometimes with toy cap-guns that made a satisfying bang.  No one was ever hurt by any of those imaginary bullets.  I must have taken a couple of tons of imaginary lead in my time and it never did me any harm.  It was called playing.  It was fun.  We were using our imaginations and getting a lot of exercise into the bargain.

But now imagination is outlawed. 

Play is outlawed.

A bit of fun is outlawed.

Don't believe me?  Go read for yourself.

The World really has gone to hell on a handcart.