difficult child 3's most precious possession (after all the computer games - maybe) is an empty shell casing he wears as a necklace. It was given to him (one given to each kid) for being in the feature film, "The Black Balloon". It's obviously empty, it has a leather thong threaded through it. He wears it to school (on the rare days we go to school - it's correspondence, but it is in the grounds of a primary/elementary school) and his teachers all know about it because difficult child 3 has talked about it and how he got it.
However, we nearly lost it when we were flying to visit my brother for his birthday, and security said it was a problem to wear on the plane. Luckily husband was able to rush back and put it in our luggage which hadn't gone through at that stage.
difficult child 1 took throwing knives to school. He didn't mean to, he had taken them in his backpack to a friend's place, they had all been throwing their knives together at a mark on the back paling fence. But at school it was of course a problem. He was suspended for three days and they should have called in the police, but didn't. I was shown the laws (not just school rules, but a combination of Dept of Ed rules and the state law) and the school actually broke the law by not calling the police. For us it was the catalyst to pulling him out of mainstream school - not for getting suspended, because he had been an idiot to take the knives with him. But for other things the school did wrong in how they handed it all.
I don't live in your neck of the woods so I can't say whether or not this was an over-reaction. I suspect in our schools, a couple of bullets wouldn't get a kid suspended (ironic, with our gun laws). It really would depend on the perceived risk. If there was a chance that the kid would have been out in the playground trying to hit the bullets with a rock to see what would happen, then yes, suspension plus a big safety talk could be on the cards. Certainly a big safety talk.
If some good can come out of this, that would be a wonderful outcome. Another good outcome would be the lesson for H, to not leave bullets too accessible in his drawer. I would hope the school would do some digging to find out why your son did this, what he planned to do and to try to instil some understanding of why it is such a serious matter.
I also agree strongly with keeping a suspended kid working on schoolwork as hard as you can. Suspension happens too easily, I feel. Kids need to be doing school work during school hours, wherever and why-ever they happen to be. Suspension for bad behaviour only rewards that behaviour, in a lot of cases.
Marg