Colton Southern, a seventh grader in Rosenberg, Texas, was forced by school officials to cover his Star Wars T-shirt because it depicted a fantasy storm trooper carrying a fictional blaster, which they considered a “weapon.”
The farce is with dark lords of the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District, who cited a dress code that prohibits “symbols oriented toward violence.” School officials claimed they went easy on Colton, by not suspending him. However, Eugene Volokh wrote in the Washington Post, “Even T-shirts depicting real weapons are constitutionally protected against K-12 school discipline.”
Colton’s father, Joe, told an ABC affiliate, “This is politically 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 … It’s just a Star Wars shirt.”