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I'm quite familiar with shotgun shells. And as a Scouter for the last 10 years, I'm also quite familiar with 4th grade boys. I don't know what you guys know about 4th grade boys. But, if you don't think that some bully in this school wasn't fully capable of taking this shell from this kid and then smacking a nail with a rock up against the primer to see what would happen, you don't know much.

I think zero-tolerance policies in schools are ridiculous. But when someone brings live ammo to school, you don't need zero-tolerance to figure that a penalty needs to be applied. Whether the one in this case was appropriate is another matter. I'd fine the parents $50 or $100, personally. It was their stupidity.

I'm no anti-gun activist, either. My son has earned his Rifle Shooting and Shotgun Shooting Merit Badges, and I was very proud when he did. But live ammo doesn't belong in school.

Yes, I brought knives to school when I was a kid. It was O.K. then. But then you didn't have schools with kids in them that get their ideas of how to run interpersonal relationships by watching hip-hop and rap videos, and thinking that fear=respect, and that the way to deal with insults (either real or perceived) is to attack someone with a weapon. In the Boy Scouts, all the kids have knives. I never saw anyone have to have a knife taken away from him because he threatened someone when I was a kid, but I've seen it now. Which is not to say that knives should be taken from Boy Scouts, nor that I think that butter knives in school should result in an expulsion. But the world has changed.