There is a sickness plaguing this nation, if not the entire developed world. It is a sickness born of tragedy and incubated by panic. Spread by the winds of outrage and fears both rational and irrational, it has grown to pandemic proportions in less than a decade. Unchecked, it now strikes at the heart of a concept and an ideal without which no civilized body can long endure. This sickness is destroying our Constitution, suppressing our personal and collective freedom and liberty. America — the country and the concept, conceived by our forefathers and preserved with varying degrees of success by all governments since — is dying.

1997 may have marked the genesis of this disease. The Columbine massacre, given worldwide, real-time attention by all manner of news media, may have first set the stage for the infection which has followed. 12 people died at the hands of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold; 24 others suffered grievous injury. In the search for reason which followed this irrational act, factors such as the goth subculture, video games, music, the effects of bullying, and depression were considered as causes for the actions of the two youths. With no clear answers forthcoming, more irrational actions followed. Although even the U.S. Secret Service advised that zero tolerance policies were unlikely to be effective, people wanted something done to give them a sense of security — even a false one would suffice. Suddenly, children were being suspended and/or arrested for having tweety bird keychains on their bookbags. The dementia began.

September 11, 2001 was a terrible, terrible day. Like many tragedies that have befallen the innocent at the hands of terrorists and criminals in all parts of the world, the attacks on the World Trade Center brought about a degree of change that makes Barack Obama’s campaign slogan seem like a cruel joke. America dug in, locked down, and shivered. Presently we recovered from the terror, but before such recovery could really take hold, the damage was done. Suddenly, places where a man could once walk and marvel at our country’s engineering wonders, military might, and strong infrastructure were now places barred by high chain-link fences and patrolled by armed guards. A bridge is now under construction on the Arizona-Nevada border, well below the Hoover Dam, and upon its completion, traffic will no longer be allowed to drive across the dam’s roadway, this having been judged an unacceptable risk. Many other such changes have been made or are pending, and those enacted in 2001 are still in force now, nearly a decade later. The word “terrorist” came to apply not only to enraged jihadist bombers, but also to the neighborhood bully whose only weapons are his fists and his stupidity. Hoax e-mails have become matters of “national security.” Police and other law enforcement agencies were given broad powers not granted them under the constitution by a piece of legislation ironically called “The Patriot Act.” The disease process is insidious, steadily progressive, and apparently unstoppable by any means yet discovered.

A second school massacre at Virginia Tech accelerated the spread of the infection. Just as the Sung-Hui Cho intended, America trembled at the sound of his weapons. Paranoia spread and multiplied exponentially. The definition of “weapon” became hopelessly broad and conveniently blurred so that innocuous objects could now be considered deadly, when such categorization seemed warranted by security considerations.

The situation is now critical. Nowhere is the destruction wrought by the disease more patently visible than in the behavior of our nation’s school administrations. Let us examine a few recent incidents, ending with the one which brought all this to mind when it appeared in this morning’s news.

August, 2007, Chandler, Arizona: A student aged 14 was handed a five-day suspension (later reduced to three) for drawing a gun. Mind you, I don’t mean unholstering a gun with intent to use it. Instead, for a class assignment, the student made a crude pencil drawing of a handgun and turned it in.

School officials term this an implied threat and — pun intended — stuck to their guns.

October 2007, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota: A student at Hamline University was suspended for sending e-mails to the University’s president which were critical of the school’s concealed weapons policy. (Like many schools, Hamline prohibits the carrying of concealed weapons on campus, even by those licensed to carry them.) Because student Troy Scheffler pointed out that the policy might be part of the problem, his e-mails were deemed “threatening.”

September, 2008, Hilton Head, South Carolina: A 10-year-old student, not identified by name, was suspended for at least two days. His pencil sharpener broke, and he held onto the pieces (including the loose blade), probably intending to fix it or dispose of it later. The linked story lacks a lot of detail, but it’s the best one I can find now. This was clearly a case where the boy had no intention of using the blade as a weapon.

May 2009, Penn Hills, PA: 15-year-old Taylor Ray-Jetter was suspended, then expelled from Penn Hills Middle School for bringing a decidedly harmless-looking eyebrow trimmer to school. The trimmer was categorized as a weapon.

October, 2009, Des Moines, Iowa: 12-year-old Jazmine Martin was suspended for one day for bringing a spent shotgun shell to school for show-and-tell. The casing was clearly empty, open at one end, and was clearly labeled “BLANK.” It was a souvenir from a summer trip to an old west show. Principal Randy Gordon claimed that spent or empty shells still are considered “ammunition,” which will be great news to soldiers who are running short of ammo at the front lines.

November 2009, Lansingburgh, New York: Eagle Scout Matthew Whalen was suspended from Lansingburgh High School for 20 days because he kept a 1-1/2 inch folding knife in his car parked on campus. The knife was part of an emergency preparedness kit and was never brought inside the school until adminstrators, probably tipped off by another student with an agenda, demanded he turn it in. The suspension and the scar on this otherwise exceptional young man’s record were upheld on appeal to the school board.

January 14, 2010, Willows, California: Last October, Gary Tudesco, a 17-year-old student at Willows High School, went duck hunting in the early morning hours before school with a friend. Not wanting to be late for school but respecting the campus weapons policy, the boys parked Tudesco’s truck off-campus on a public street, leaving the unloaded weapons inside. Hours later, a search dog employed by school officials apparently alerted on his vehicle. School officials saw the weapons inside and immediately suspended Tudesco. He was eventually given a one-year expulsion from school on the grounds that he was a danger to himself and other students. Police and the District Attorney said the boy had done nothing wrong, but school officials cited a California state law (not cited in the story) that gives school officials the power to search a student’s vehicle during school hours regardless of its location! An appeal is pending, and the National Rifle Association is assisting with the case.

Looking beyond the schools, we have extreme overreactions in spades as well. We are practically strip-searched before every airline flight, yet people like the Undiebomber manage to elude even this indignity. Paranoia is not a solution; it is a symptom.

Can there be a cure?