“Guns, hunting, etc., are not subjects that are to be discussed in school,” informed the administrator. So read a letter sent to Collinsville, Illinois, resident Kristy Jackson, the mother of a four-year-old boy suspended for seven days. His offense?

He secretly brought a spent .22 caliber shell casing to school and enjoys turning toys into imaginary guns.

Moreover, the school, A Place 2 Grow in Troy, doesn’t like certain facts any more than it does imagination. When Mrs. Jackson related her woes in a now-viral Facebook post, the school reported her to the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) in what she described to The New American as a “revenge move.”

As for the shell casing, it’s not that her son, little Hunter, had just returned from a gangland hit. His grandfather, a Caseyville police officer, had taken the boy to learn gun safety and do some target practicing over the weekend, and Hunter had secretly picked the casing up at the range. Subsequently, and unbeknownst to his parents, he brought it into school thinking it was a neat show-and-tell kind of item.

The gunphobic officials at A Place 2 Grow (liberal?) didn’t see it that way. Mrs. Jackson reported in the Facebook post that, when she picked Hunter up from school on Tuesday, she was met by a “stone faced teacher” who told her that her son “brought a ‘shotgun bullet’ to school.”

After being escorted to an office, Jackson wasn’t shown a “shotgun bullet,” wholly unsurprising since there’s no such thing. (Shotguns fire “shot,” which contais pellets. The educators didn’t know this; all they knew was they hated guns.) Rather, she was “handed a tiny .22 empty brass casing,” as Jackson related on Facebook.

She explained that she was also “handed a piece of paper. No words, just eyebrows raised in disgust at my son, explaining that his behavior warranted a 7 school day suspension. Which I still was expected to pay tuition for, of course. And a threat that if his enthusiasm for guns continued, he'd be permanently expelled.”

Mrs. Jackson points out that her son doesn’t have access to any weapon at home, that he “never hurt anyone, or threatened anyone,” and that what befell him could happen to any child who found such an item. And, of course, she would have stopped Hunter from bringing the shell casing to school had she known about it.

Yet A Place 2 Grow wasn’t done. Perhaps upset by the bad press, its v.p. of operations, Roy Jarman, sent Jackson an e-mail (which I‘ve seen) stating, “Everything has been saved and sent to our attorney. You won’t remove your post with all the facts, so we will go the legal route. I will also notify DCFS in the morning.”

Mrs. Jackson told The New American that the school did call DCFS, but that she had actually called the department first. She also said that DCFS told the school to “kick rocks,” as she put it, because the case had no merit.

Unfortunately, this story reflects not just the insanity of some teachers but of our times. In the 1940s and ‘50s, youths would sometimes take rifles on the New York City subways because their schools had gun clubs and target shooting after school. No one even blinked. When I was a kid growing up in NYC, we still brought realistic-looking toy guns to school. No one batted an eye.

Now school officials go batty if a child even whispers about firearms — literally. As Mrs. Jackson reported about A Place 2 Grow, “Every time he [Hunter] or another child mentions a gun (like every boy I grew up with did) they punish him.”

In fact, Jackson was informed in the aforementioned letter that “Hunter has been told that guns, hunting, etc., are not subjects that are to be discussed in school. He has been redirected to other activities when he has chosen to make guns out of other toys.”

And this isn’t even the most bizarre school gunphobia story. Recent years have seen incidents in which children were suspended for using Nerf guns on school grounds, or punished for drawing a firearm or shaping their fingers as one and saying "bang!"

What explains this gunphobia? A large part of it is just misguided emotion, with ill-conditioned teachers and administrators displaying juvenile knee-jerk reactions. But there’s another factor, and it isn’t safety.

As commentator Timothy Birdnow explained at American Thinker, if leftists “really cared about safety and security, they would not support letting hordes of aliens invade the country. They would not support weak laws and anemic sentencing laws. [And] Obama would not have emptied the prisons shortly before he left office.”

So what is the actual agenda? Birdnow continues:

The whole point of these hysterical reactions to anything even remotely associated with firearms is to make them taboo, to create a sense of horror in the average person. While leftists are merrily picking the lock on the most sordid and vile of human passions, celebrating things that were once not even discussed in private, they are at the same time trying to make the public fear and loathe the things they do not want — such as guns. Just as it is impossible to speak out against the redefinition of marriage today, so too do they want it impossible to defend firearms or even whisper about them publicly.

Doubt me? Well, the Boston Globe called for just this sort of thing. As they point out, it worked to kill cigarettes.

If you still doubt it, consider what ex-Obama attorney General Eric Holder stated in a 1990s speech (video below):

What we need to do is change the way people think about guns — especially young people — and make it something that's not cool; that it's not acceptable, it's not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way that we've changed our attitudes about cigarettes.... Over time we changed the way people thought about smoking, so now we have people who cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don't want to admit it. And that's what I think we need to do with guns.... I've asked that the creative community in Washington ... devote [their] talent in a more constructive way, so we can get at the minds of these young people.... People who have credibility with young people should be on the television, on the radio ... and telling these youngsters that it's wrong to carry a gun.... I've also asked the school board to make a part of every day some kind of anti-violence, anti-gun message; every day, every school at every level. One thing that I think is clear with young people, and with adults as well, is that we have to be repetitive about this.... We need to do this every day of the week and just really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way. [Emphasis added.]

“Every day” at “every school at every level,” some kind of “anti-gun message” that’s “repetitive” so they can “brainwash” people. Well, well.

The good news is that firearm ownership is one area in which Americans have actually become more “conservative” in recent years, with support for Second Amendment rights now surpassing support for stripping them.

So, who knows? With a little luck, perhaps today’s children will grow up and associate “gun control” with the mean, stone-faced teacher who tormented them during their tender years.