Great Moments in Government Stupidity

This is not a story from The Onion. Instead, the Associated Press has a report of a school in Rhode Island that banned the hat of little eight-year old David Morales because he decorated it with a couple of toy soldiers that...gasp...had tiny little plastic weapons. I'm not even sure what to say about this, other than that the school bureaucrats probably applied for jobs with TSA and were demonstrating that they were qualified. On the other hand, if the school's history classes teach that we beat the Nazis by prevailing in a game of rock-paper-scissors, then perhaps the school truly does have a "zero tolerance" policy about weapons. Here's the relevant section of the report:

Christan Morales said her son just wanted to honor American troops when he wore a hat to school decorated with an American flag and small plastic Army figures. But the school banned the hat because it ran afoul of the district's zero-tolerance weapons policy. Why? The toy soldiers were carrying tiny guns. "His teacher called and said it wasn't appropriate," Morales said. Morales' 8-year-old son, David, had been assigned to make a hat for the day when his second-grade class would meet their pen pals from another school. She and her son came up with an idea to add patriotic decorations to a camouflage hat. Earlier this week, after the hat was banned, the principal at the Tiogue School in Coventry told the family that the hat would be fine if David replaced the Army men holding weapons with ones that didn't have any, according to Superintendent Kenneth R. Di Pietro.