The Post’s Donna St. George reports:

A 7-year-old Anne Arundel County boy was suspended Friday for chewing his breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun and saying, “bang, bang”— an offense that the school described as a threat to other students, according to his family.
The pastry “gun” was a rectangular strawberry-filled bar, akin to a Pop-Tart, that the second-grader had tried to nibble into the shape of a mountain, but then found it looked more like a gun, said his father, William “B.J.” Welch.
Welch said an assistant principal at Park Elementary School told him that his son pointed the pastry at a classmate. The boy maintains he pointed it at the ceiling, according to his father.
“In my eyes, it’s irrelevant; I don’t care who he pointed it at,” Welch said. “It was harmless. It was a danish.”

Seriously, world?

Look, Reality, this is too much. Leave this sort of grotesque parody to the Onion, where it belongs. It is stories like this that have reduced the Onion to tweeting unspeakable things about 9-year-olds. That is not what anyone wants to happen. But you have left them no choice, continually encroaching on their territory like this. Please, stay out of it. They might at least have made it funny. This is just depressing.

Sure, perhaps this case has stronger legs to stand on than the recent case with the finger-gun suspension. After all, as a commenter on the story points out, a Pop-Tart can be dangerous. Why, you might eat it.

When I initially heard about the threatening Pop-Tart, it made sense. I knew that the Let’s Move/Let’s Eradicate Obesity/Let’s Protect the Children From the Processed Sugars by Circling the Kale Wagons campaign was entering a new phase, but I didn’t realize that they were suspending kids for waving Pop-Tarts menacingly in your general direction. What, I wondered, were they going to do to the guy who brings cupcakes for his birthday? No doubt he’d be expelled!

It turned out that the Pop-Tart was menacing only for its shape, not for its contents. But give it time. At the rate things are turning absurd, that’s hardly a stretch.