The US government’s monopoly education system is a travesty mostly because taxpayers spend record amounts of money and we get very poor results.

But I’m also irked at the way government schools engage in absurd displays of political correctness, particularly when it comes to make-believe weapons.

A little boy was suspended for throwing an imaginary grenade while playing by himself in Colorado. A school wanted to force a deaf child to change his name because, when using sign language to say who he is, his fingers looked like a gun. Speaking of which, a six-year old in Maryland was suspended for saying “pow” while having his fingers shaped like a gun.

All this sounds crazy, but at least school bureaucrats are consistent in their nuttiness. Not only are they against non-existent grenades and imaginary guns, they all have a zero-tolerance approach for bows and arrows that don’t exist.

Here are some of the details about what happened at a Pennsylvania school.

A ten-year-old boy has reportedly been suspended from school after he ‘fired’ an imaginary bow and arrow at another pupil. Johnny Jones, a fifth grader at South Eastern Middle School in Fawn Grove, Pennsylvania, is said to have been suspended for one day after making the gesture and now faces expulsion.

According to the Rutherford Institute, which is defending the youngster, Johnny was accused of breaching the school’s regulations on using weapons, even though the bow and arrow were not real. He was reprimanded after the girl he ‘fired’ the bow at notified a teacher.

It’s ridiculous that the little boy was suspended, but you also have to wonder about the mental stability of the little girls who ratted him out. Is she just a run-of-the-mill tattle tale? Or is she in training to become a tax bureaucrat in Chicago? Or maybe she went through training on how to be a snitch in the United Kingdom?

But we also have another story of political correctness run amok in government schools. Bureaucrats in Colorado have nabbed a sexual predator. Are we talking about a 17-year old gang member who was raping and sexually assaulting other students?

Well…not quite. Here’s what Fox News is reporting.

A 6-year-old boy has been suspended from a Colorado school for kissing a girl on the cheek. School officials in Canon City are accusing the boy of sexual harassment and they want it on his school record. The boy’s mother tells KRDO-TV…the girl did not object to being kissed. She told the station that the two children like each other.

To be fair, maybe the boy is genuinely pestering the girl and – notwithstanding what his mother says – the attention is unwelcome. In that case, some punishment is warranted, particularly since it happened twice.

Though I’m not sure I would categorise it as sexual harassment. This is what makes this story worth sharing. It illustrates the lack of common sense that seems inevitable when bureaucrats are in charge of anything.

And since we’re talking about a lack of common sense, here are previous examples of school bureaucrats going overboard for political correctness:

- Bureaucrats suspended a little boy for taking bites out of a pop tart in such a way that it was shaped like a gun.

- Bureaucrats busted a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.

- A teacher in Rhode Island caught an 8-year old boy with some plastic toy army men.

- Bureaucrats evacuated a school because an 11-year old boy made a motion detector for his science experiment.

- Bureaucrats in Florida kicked an 8-year old boy out of school for a year because he had a plastic gun in his backpack.

- A dual award in Virginia, with half the prize for the bureaucrats who suspended a 10-year old boy for a toy gun and half the prize for the cops who then arrested the kid.

- A third-grader got in trouble for having toy army men on his birthday cupcakes.

- Two second-graders got suspended for holding pencils like they were guns.

- Bureaucrats suspended a kindergartener for having a lego-sized toy gun.

- Bureaucrats suspended two boys for playing with toy guns while off school property.

You’ll notice that all these examples involved non-imaginary objects: Real toy guns; real army men; real pencils; real motion detectors; real Lego pieces.

Aren’t we lucky that government is there to protect us? Sort of the same way they protect us with regulations, as Dave Barry has explained.

Daniel J. Mitchell is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, the free-market, Washington D.C. think tank. His articles are cross-posted on his blog, by agreement. The Commentator is Britain's fastest growing on-line, quality comment and news outlet. Take a look around the site by clicking on The Commentator