When I saw this headline I did a double take, because I thought I’d posted this story months ago. It turned out that I had, sort of, only that case back in August concerned a boy in Arizona who’d sketched a very blocky gun with a trigger lock on it. He got suspended. The kid in this New Jersey case didn’t even go that far — he just sketched a toy. And got suspended.

A New Jersey second-grader’s drawing of a stick figure shooting a gun has earned him a one-day school suspension.

Seven-year-old Kyle Walker’s mom told an The Press newspaper of Atlantic City that her son was suspended for violating the district’s zero-tolerance policy on guns. She said her son told her he’d drawn a water pistol.

Kyle gave the picture to another child on the school bus, and that child’s parents complained about it to school officials.

As I said in that post back in August, if zero tolerance had been around when I was in school, this honors student would have been suspended routinely. Zero tolerance policies need to take into account one immutable fact: Boys are going to be boys.