The grade-school drawing looked typically innocent, at least in its style. The subjects were two stick figures, one of them wearing a loopy smile. But the teacher in San Bernardino, Calif., who found it stowed in a student's desk was alarmed by the story line. One grinning stick figure wielded a gun. The other, frowning, had just been shot.
The sketch, from the hand of an eight-year-old with a penchant for nasty temper tantrums, was drawn only days after a six-year-old in Michigan fatally shot a classmate, so school officials decided to be on the safe side. They brought the drawing...