Teachers and administrators are hamstrung by the 'rights' of students not be be expelled or, in fact, disciplined in any way whatsoever lest someone make a Federal case out of it. So they feel themselves forced to call in the cops to arrest five-year-olds.

Students are simultaneously vulnerable to excessively invasive searches (strip searches, urine tests) and airport-style metal detectors are in common use.

Then, in many schools peanut butter -- that most American of foodstuffs -- is contraband!

An impartial observer might conclude that we have all gone quite mad.

But, really, this is all the perfectly logical consequence of the post-Sixties partition of all legal power between the individual and the Federal government, leaving all intermediary structures (family, school, church, neighborhood, town, city, county, state) utterly stripped of authority while being held completey responsible for all untoward results.

You had me and you lost me with the peanut butter. Peanut allergies are widespread and can be very deadly. 100 people a year die from peanut allergies in the U.S. About 1% of children are allergic to peanuts, and therefore every school of any size has students who are allergic to peanuts. Exposure to tiny trace amounts of peanut protein can be enough to cause a severe reaction.

There are only about 10 deaths from venomous snakes in the U.S. per year. Venomous snakes are not exactly permitted in most schools either.

Nowhere near 100 people die of peanuts annually in the US -- the number comes from wikipedia via an unsourced opinion piece in a culpepper, virginia newspaper. Hardly definitive.

I should like to see actual autopsy reports of those hundred American who died last year -- nothing less, given the sensationalism rampant among anti-peanut activists, would be dispositive.

The British Medical Journal found 1 food-allergy death in children under 16 in the UK per year from 1990-2000. This is sufficiently rare that it makes far more sense to segregate sensitive children than to include them amongst the normals with the concomitant strip-search level anti-peanut security that would be logically necessary. (see <link>

I do not impose my children's peculiarities upon the entire population; I would hope that parents of allergic children would be at least as responsible.

Why argue the peanut butter point? It is really trite next to the other issues you mention.

Whatever your "opinion" might be, my wife is one of those people highly allergic to peanuts. Even a whiff of peanuts, across the room, makes her itch and swell. This is the reason they are banned, not because of some weird conspiracy, but because liability insurance would be through the roof if they didn't.