I was once a persistent, grievous threat to the children of Washington County.

From the late 1970s to the mid 1980s, most weekdays from September to May, I boarded the school bus carrying at least one concealed weapon. I also often carried explosives and other “aggressive” objects. My summers included week-long weapons and survivalist training. And I constantly read books on how to develop those skills and use the weapons and explosives, and what fun they can be.

In my defense, many of my schoolmates were also packing weapons, explosives, and aggressive objects, reading the same books, and taking summer weapons training and survivalist classes. We were a team of pre-teen terrorists with mayhem in our backpacks, an al-Qaida in Toughskins.

Or we were just living a normal childhood. The pocketknives, model rocket engines and toy soldiers we carried, the adventure books we read (like Tom Sawyer or the Hardy Boys and Mad Scientists’ Club series), and the summer camps and scouting trips we attended stimulated our minds, introduced us to science and adventure, and helped ready us for adulthood. Many of us bought our juvenile arsenals at the school store, where preparedness, military history and rocketry were considered interests to be nurtured. And adults told us that every kid should carry a pocketknife (along with some cash and a handkerchief) because “you just might need it.”

Today, kids who follow that sage advice should be prepared for counseling, suspension or expulsion. Such stories come out every day, from the Easton, Md., lacrosse players who used a penknife and cigarette lighter to cut and seal their mesh strings,[1] to the Anne Arundel Co., Md. second-grader who chewed his Pop-tart into the shape of a pistol,[2] to children who play “finger gun” cops-and-robbers on the playground.[3] Parents also make the news, like the Silver Spring, Md., family now being investigated by Child Protective Services after their children were spotted—egad!—walking home alone from a nearby park wearing disheveled clothes.[4]

Some people defend those investigations and penalties. They say we can’t be too careful about possibly deviant behavior and potentially dangerous objects in this post-Columbine, post-Adam Walsh world. The risks that children face today are far different from those of a generation ago.

That’s true, but not in the way these people think. Today’s children are even safer than the last generation’s very safe kids.

Over the past quarter-century (and probably for much longer, though data are limited before the 1990s), the number of children violently assaulted at school (and elsewhere) has fallen steadily from already low levels. In the early 1990s, one in 200 children age 12–18 was the victim of some form of assault at school in a one-year period—usually the traditional playground dust-up. Today that risk has fallen 80 percent, to one child in 1,000. Concerning the worst violent crime imaginable, in the early 1990s one child in 1.7 million age 5–17 was murdered in school in a one-year period; in recent years it’s around one child in 3 million.[5]

Of course, the death of any child is a tragedy. But the risk of violent death at school is extremely low. That tiny risk and its long, persistent decline belie the paranoid justifications for harsh school penalties for pocketknives and finger guns, not to mention schools’ growing use of metal detectors and armed policemen.

But, some people say, such measures are justified if they make children even safer. Yet these same people put their children at far greater risk by driving them to music lessons, soccer practice or church services. Over the period 1999–2013, more than twice as many children ages 1–18 died in motor vehicle accidents as from homicides—let alone the fraction of homicides that happen at school.[6]

People expose their children to vehicle risk because they (rightly) judge that risk to be small and justified by the benefits of learning an instrument, playing a sport and practicing their faith. The same judgment can be made about such childhood rites as model rocketry and summer camp marksmanship classes. And, for that matter, about school buildings that are inviting rather than patrolled and monitored like a prison.

So why, if today’s children face such a tiny and diminishing risk of violence at school, is society intent on such harsh, rigid school safety rules? Because it’s politically wise to do so.

In those extremely rare instances when a terrible crime does occur, few people care about the poor cost–benefit tradeoffs of “zero tolerance” rules and penalties. No school board or administration wants to face the after-the-fact finger-pointing and “Why didn’t you take this precaution?” question from a distraught public that is no longer mindful of how unreasonable those precautions are for risks that approach zero. Besides, some parents are absolutely thrilled when officials vow to “spare no expense” to protect the children—even if that expense includes the loss of cherished parts of childhood.

And so, politics leads us to equate pocketknives with machine guns and toy soldiers with bombs. But are we really protecting our children if we treat healthy childhoods like terrorism?

Thomas A. Firey is a senior fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute and a Washington County native.