Whenever something horrible happens -- like a kid getting hurt at school -- in the following attempts to ensure "never again," one simplistic but popular suggestion is "zero tolerance."
At its heart I think it's just magical thinking. Punish Tylenol and immunize yourself from heroin overdoses. Come down like a ton of bricks on a plastic cake knife, and somehow it's less likely a knife or a gun will appear.
It's irrational, of course. The kid with a cake knife is not the same kid who's going to bring a pistol or a switchblade, and that kid's not going to get caught by the homeroom teacher anyway if they're really intent on doing harm.
It's the same logic as banning nail files or tiny knives on airplanes. Someone determined to do harm could do worse with a sharpened pencil, but somehow it's imagined that if you block anything remotely resembling a weapon, you're more protected from ... actual weapons.
So we get stupid rules, and punish the wrong kids for the wrong things.
You may be right that there's an element of misguided legal butt covering involved as well. People love to sue a school, and because "zero tolerance" sounds good to people, and requires no critical thinking to apply, a school or county could argue it's "doing everything it can." "Look, we ruined a kid's reputation for giving her friend a Midol, so how can it be our fault if someone else brought a crack pipe?"
Any way we slice it though, it's bad thinking. We DO know the difference between guns and cake knives and aspirin and crystal meth. We CAN differentiate between kids hugging in the hallway and committing rape under the bleachers.
And if we can't, we're in a lot more trouble than that posed by the actual threats we're considering.
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