Magic Hobbit Ring Leads to 9-Year-Old's Suspension

Did a Texas school go a little too far over a boy's magical threat? Kermit Elementary School suspended 9-year-old Aiden Steward for making "terroristic threats" when, soon after seeing The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, he told a classmate last week that he could make him disappear with a magic ring like the one in the movie, Raw Story reports. Of course the ring was not, as the boy claimed, the "one ring to rule them all" forged in Mount Doom, but Aiden's father tells the Odessa American that the school informed him that all threats, even fantastical ones, had to be taken seriously.

The father says he doesn't understand why the school didn't just send a letter home with the fourth-grader instead of removing him from school. "Kids act out movies that they see. When I watched Superman as a kid, I went outside and tried to fly," the father tells the New York Daily News. "I assure you my son lacks the magical powers necessary to threaten his friend's existence," he says. "If he did, I'm sure he'd bring him right back." (Two Colorado fourth-graders were suspended for something a little more serious: selling their grandparents' pot.)