To the editor:

I usually do not respond to stories I read on the Internet, but now “we” have gone too far.

I cannot believe two second-graders were suspended for pretending their pencils were guns and making “gun noises” with them.

I would have been suspended a million times if this ridiculous rule had been in place when I was in the second grade, and I never shot anyone with a real weapon, ever, although I probably did shoot most of my classmates, at one time or another, with my pencil machine gun or finger pistol.

The tragedy in Connecticut was horrible, but our country, especially our schools, has gone too far with its measures supposedly designed to prevent this from recurring. Suspending two second-grade children playing with pencils and pretending to be Marines or Army soldiers is not going to prevent or solve the problem. It just makes us look really dumb.

Just out of curiosity, how much time did the teacher spend away from the class to handle this “incident”? Whatever it was, it was wasted time. Imagine what would have happened if the teacher had just asked the kids to stop and left it at that. The Suffolk school district would not have been pummeled by people like me, and the children would not have had so many distractions caused by this overreaction.

By the way, I did a Google search, and I found there are no reported cases of school shootings, ever, caused by kids pretending to shoot kids with pencils.

This country has guns and from time to time disturbed people will kill innocent people with them, but this type of overreaction will not prevent such shootings from occurring.

Policies like this are ridiculous.

Mike Kowatch

Latrobe, Pa.