The kitchen knife might as well have been a sawed-off shotgun. The policy doesn't discriminate. By that reasoning, a hundred everyday objects could be termed weapons under the same policy. A brooch, a steel-toed boot, a pair of scissors, a letter opener, a box cutter, a baseball bat. Ridiculous stretches, to be sure.
Violence creeping onto school grounds is a serious matter.
Random school shootings shatter everybody's sense of security. But violence is rare, random school shootings extremely so. Unfortunately, the hyped-up frenzy that informs the television reporting of these events has turned schools into irrational bunkers of paranoia. The embarrassing situation at Estero High School is a direct result of zero-tolerance policies creeping out of that paranoia. Lacking intelligent interpretation, these zero-tolerance policies become tyrants, and those who are supposed to interpret them become their slaves.