By Petula Dvorak, January 07, 2013

“There will be no guns in this house, ” I once declared, when I was new to parenting, thought I knew what I was doing, and my first child was a wobbly toddler obsessed with trains.

I now duck and dodge while writing this, foam Nerf bullets whizzing past my head, as my 6- and 8-year-old boys engage in heavy battle.

After years of throwing away toy guns given by grandparents, disarming every Star Wars guy who came locked and loaded in his cryo-freeze plastic packet and even allowing only squirt guns shaped like spitting dolphins, I gave up.

Christmas of 2010, Daddy bought every male in the house a full Nerf arsenal. And they had the best Christmas morning ever, chasing each other up the stairs, down the hall, into the garden, through Grandma’s pansies. Pop! Pop! Pop!

Got a problem with that? You shouldn’t.

It’s hard, of course, not to think of those 20 small bodies inside Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut every time the topic of children and guns comes up.

The only place darker for a parent to go than imagining your child killed by a gun is wondering what it would be like to raise the gunman. And some of us decide we’ll do everything in our power to prevent it.

But then we get crazy, and common sense goes out the window.

Take, for example, the 6-year-old boy in Silver Spring who was suspended last month for pointing his finger like a gun at another child. The parents got an attorney, and the school reversed the suspension last week.

Each year, these stories make headlines, reminding us of how crazy and confused we’ve become.

But in the process, lots of parents and teachers are doing some soul-searching on where the limits are.

At least twice a year, Joshua A. Weiner, a child psychiatrist based in McLean, gets a patient like this, a child suspended from school because he pretended to use a gun or said he would.

“It didn’t surprise me at all that that kid was suspended, ” Weiner said. “The pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.”

And never once has one of the children sent to him after being suspended from school shown any serious signs of trouble.