‘Star Wars’ shirt with space gun banned by school

“Star Wars” shirts featuring fictional weapons have joined “Pop-Tart guns” on the list of items schools will not tolerate.

Seventh-grader Colton Southern of George Junior High School in Rosenberg, Texas, was told to cover up his “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” shirt last Thursday because it depicted a space gun from “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”

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Joe Southern, the boy’s father, told KTRK-13 ABC the school’s decision was embarrassing.

“It’s political correctness run amok. You’re talking about a ‘Star Wars’ T-shirt, a week before the biggest movie of the year comes out. It has nothing to do with guns or making a stand. It’s just a ‘Star Wars’ shirt,” Southern said Dec. 11.

“Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens” opens in theaters Dec. 18. Distributors say the film, directed by J.J. Abrams, may make $220 million in domestic sales this weekend.

Lamar Consolidated Independent School District responded to the network’s story last Friday by saying “symbols oriented toward violence” are a violation of its dress code. Southern could have been given an in-school suspension, but was only told to zip up his jacket.

“He’s a Boy Scout, active in church, volunteers at Brazos Bend State Park. There’s not a violent bone in his body. He’s just an excited kid for the movie,” said Southern.

Southern’s story is reminiscent of 7-year-old Josh Welch of Anne Arundel County, Maryland, who was suspended in May 2013 for two days after chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun.

See what American education has become, in “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”

A Catholic school in Cincinnati, Ohio, also suspended a first-grader in October for pretending to shoot a bow and arrow.

Principal Joe Crachiolo of Our Lady of Lourdes suspended Martha Miele’s son Oct. 29 because there is “no tolerance for any real, pretend, or imitated violence,” inside the building, WND reported.

“I didn’t really understand. I had him on the phone for a good amount of time so he could really explain to me what he was trying to tell me,” Miele told WLWT-5 NBC Nov. 2. “My question to him was, ‘Is this really necessary? Does this really need to be a three-day suspension under the circumstances that he was playing and he’s 6 years old?'”