We don’t want our children subjected to the disciplinary whims of school officials who lack common sense and ignore their own policies about what qualifies as acceptable behavior, speech or dress.

The latest case of bureaucratic overreach occurred at Logan Middle School in my home state of West Virginia, where an anti-gun zealot who also happens to be a teacher picked a fight with a student over his pro-Second Amendment t-shirt. This particular student, eighth-grader Jared Marcum, was old enough to protest — and did.

Marcum should have respected authority enough to change shirts and let his father argue the point, but he’s just a kid. When that didn’t happen, the adults in the room should have acted like it. Instead, the school not only suspended Marcum but also had him arrested, a decision that forced Marcum’s father to leave work and just inflamed the situation further.

Unfortunately, Marcum’s case is not unique, and the other students punished by public schools for simulating guns or carrying toy guns have been far younger. Here’s a list of the incidents, which likely will continue to grow as the hysteria over guns does:

• The most egregious case occurred in Nebraska. Grand Island Public Schools insisted that 3-year-old deaf student Hunter Spanjer not use Signing Exact English to say his name because “Hunter” in sign language is the hand in the shape of a gun. The school system backed down when it appeared the American Civil Liberties Union and National Association of the Deaf could get involved in the dispute.
• Mount Carmel Area Elementary School in Pennsylvania suspended a 5-year-old because she invited her peers to make a game of shooting each other with a Hello Kitty bubble gun. The charge from Principal Susan Nestico: The girl made a “terroristic threat.”
• Center School in Hopkinton, Mass., suspended 5-year-old Jonah Stone for taking a toy gun to school. School policy did not prohibit such replicas, so the school superintendent overturned the suspension.
• Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School in Montgomery County, Md., suspended 6-year-old Rodney Logan for holding his fingers in the shape of a gun. The school lifted the suspension and removed it from Lynch’s record after the decision became public. Talbot County Elementary School suspended two other 6-year-olds for similar behavior while playing cops and robbers during recess.
• UPDATE, May 11: Driver Elementary School in Suffolk, Va., suspended two 7-year-olds, including Christopher Marshall, for pointing pencils at each other and making “machine-gun noises.” Outcry over the incident prompted the school district to revisit its policy on “look-alike” guns.
• Park Elementary School in Baltimore suspended 7-year-old Joshua Welch for eating his pastry into a shape that his teacher thought looked like a gun.
• Mary Blair Elementary School in Loveland, Colo., suspended 7-year-old Alex Evans for tossing an imaginary hand grenade and making the sound to go with it. Evans was acting in a game he called “rescue the world.” The school has an “absolute” rule against weapons both real and imaginary.
• The Suffolk County, N.Y., Pistol License Bureau suspended the pistol license of John Mayer because Mayer’s 10-year-od son by the same name threatened to use a water gun, paint gun or BB gun on two classmates. The son didn’t actually commit a crime or even posses a weapon.

These anti-gun witch hunts of children (and their parents) have become so ridiculous since the Newtown, Conn., school shooting last December that one Maryland lawmaker has proposed legislation to crack down on the schools, not the students.

By teaching our children at home, we don’t subject them or ourselves to such nonsense.

(Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.)