Chanute Elementary School principal Gary Wheeler left a student in tears and threatened him with a 168-day suspension because the hysterical anti-gun “educator” doesn’t understand the difference between a live round of ammunition and a spent shell casing.

The student’s mother, Deana Carlson of Chanute, believes the suspension was inappropriate.

Carlson said her son, Camron Carlson, was out with her the night before, Tuesday Dec. 2, where she was sighting a rifle for deer hunting season with a friend, and he picked up one of the empty shell casings and put it in his pocket.

Carlson said her son had told his friends that they had been sighting rifles the night before, and that the shell casing fell out of his pocket.

“There was no threat,” she said. “My child’s never been in a fight at school. He was just being a boy and bragging because it’s cool.”

Carlson was called into the school office where she saw her son had been crying.

Carlson said she was not happy with her son for having the shell casing, which everyone agrees he should not have had at school. She said she was told by Principal Gary Wheeler that the incident could lead to a 168-day suspension, but they could possibly reduce it to five days if he spoke to Superintendent James Hardy.

“I looked at him and I said ‘this is the wrong call,'” she said. “I could understand if there was a student who had multiple offenses…there was nothing dangerous about what he had done.”

Carlson said Wheeler then told her “you need to just go on.”

“My child should not have been bawling,” she said. “The principal made him feel that an empty shell was dangerous. In some people’s eyes maybe it is.”

Principal Wheeler and other anti-liberty propagandists in our public schools have lost all sense of proportion, logic, and reason.

A shell casing is not a weapon, nor it it ammunition. Wheeler grossly overstepped his bounds and threatened a good child out of his own ignorance and hysteria.

A reasonable administrator and disciplinarian would have confiscated the casing. He would have explained to the student that such items are inappropriate for school, and that some people might confuse it for actual ammunition, which is against school policy and the law. He would have let the student off with a warning and a call to the parent.

And that would have been the end of it.

But our education administrators refuse to act with reason and intelligence these days. They hide behind policies. A child who repeatedly attacks and bullies other students or sells drugs on campus may get second and third and fourth chances, but a child who draws a picture of a gun is forced to sign a suicide contract even when they she is too young to understand the word.

It’s time to do away with zero-tolerance, zero-intelligence educational politics, and the slow-witted bullies that push them.