It’s not difficult to understand how the Salem Witch Trails got started. Just witness the current hysteria surrounding guns. Children have been suspended from school for making a gun with their fingers, and Nerf guns that bear absolutely no resemblance to actual firearms have caused full blown panic lockdowns. People are losing their reason.
Now, lawmakers in Hawaii are considering the next plunge into idiocy. They’re looking at banning all toy guns.
Some state lawmakers are looking to shoot down toy gun sales. New bills introduced would make it a crime to sell a toy gun to any child under 18. The idea alone is already creating controversy.
The proposals are supposedly aimed at keeping kids from getting into trouble by bringing toy guns to school. They’ve been instructed not to do it, and that they will lose their toys if they do it. But some few do it anyway. Solution: Ban them for everyone! Criminalize the sale of toys to kids!
We like to think that we’ve progressed since the days of yore. We haven’t. Some people will always panic, and some people will always exploit people who panic.
I brought my toy musket to school once, 4th grade. Blue windbreaker jacket, blue kepi. I think it was dress-up day. Nothing said.
I will be blunt–the trendy minorities and Progressives can take their version of America and shove it. They know nothing about the securing of liberty.
When I was in grade school, if we had been well behaved, the teachers would let us bring toys to play with during recess. That was anything from guns (no caps though) to one older boy with the Holy Grail: a Millenium Falcon with a bunch of Star Wars guys in it.
A couple of years the school had holiday pageants and such. The Thanksgiving ones had Pilgrims with guns and Indians with bows and tomahawks. Even plays made for school kids and sold at the teacher’s stores had cowboys and Indians with appropriate weapons. Heck, even the one we did with robots from space, one of the robots had a ray gun.
Great way to lead to more accidental deaths. Have you ever seen what happens when a bunch of kids who have never seen a gun react when they see a real one? I have – they end up grabbing it, pointing it at each other and pulling the trigger as if they were in some movie. No thought as to what could actually happen.
Those of us who grew up around firearms were horrified and quickly moved to disarm them and check before someone got shot. The more you take away something, the greater the desire becomes: liquor, drugs, cigarettes, etc.
This is anecdotal of course, but just to support your point:
My dad was a cop. I was five when he showed his revolver (A 3″ S&W Chief, back when they made them). He showed me how it worked, explained what makes the bullet come out of the gun and let me handle it under his supervision. He explained it to me the same way he did a hammer, drill and screwdriver. The gun was never forbidden fruit so I never went looking for it. If I wanted to see it I just had to wait till dad got home and ask.
I was seven when he first took me shooting, and nine when I got my first weapon (a Ruger 10/22). He taught me safety rules and trigger discipline, he taught me how to clean the guns after use and lock them up. His instruction helped me do very well on my high school’s rifle team. That’s right, the school GAVE us rifles and in 70 years no one ever got injured, a safety record that put the football team to shame.
There were more toy weapons in the house than I can recall. Almost every game my brothers and I played had to do with someone getting shot. Imaginary nazis, alien invaders, spectre agents and super-villains were killed by the thousands.
I’m 45 now and to date I’ve never had an unintended discharge or shot anything I didn’t mean to shoot. I’ve never committed a crime more serious than speeding and my guns have never harmed a soul.
Its not just kids but supposed grown ups. When I was a kid, my dad kept a .38 in the family room in case someone tried to get in. An adult cousin of mine had some friends over, all of them were female. One of them found the gun and started playing with it. I told them it was real and she said it wasn’t and pointed it at me. I ran out of the room which they all thought was funny. Then she pointed it at my dog. Never having seen a gun the dog walked right up to her. Fortunately the gun didn’t go off, in the dog’s face. She managed to pull the trigger when such that the bullet went into the floor nearby. Good thing her trigger finger was so weak.
Are they going to ban fingers next? We might need a bunch of them Iranian finger cutting off machines.
Proving again that the matter of the mentally unstable is indeed a factor in the whole gun debate ……
Tactical Full-Auto Bubble Guns are the new leading cause of workplace terrorism. Just as Alan Dershowitz feared, the worst has happened in this Austin newsroom during a staff meeting that spun out of control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHfTKq3QC7U
Let’s not be too hasty because this could be a win-win situation. Suppose that President Obama, enthralled by the prospect of banning even toy guns, were to resign and move (back?) to Hawaii. Perhaps he might then run for Governor or at least Gun Control Officer, possibly leading to a “red” State of Hawaii.
It’s hard to believe, but even with President Obama there can be positive outcomes.
That’s OK.
Remember the Downy bottle, that nice blue thing with the pleasing curves? Those made nice ray guns because of their futuristic look, once you got the stickers off of course. Lot’s of laundry stuff comes in bottles now that could serve the same purpose. So they’ll ban those next I guess. Maybe kids will take up whittling then and make guns out of boards and sticks. Ban scrap lumber and order all sticks picked up. Then it will come down to making guns with their fingers. What then Utopian?
Sounds to me like an infringement of 2nd Amendment rights. Kids have that right too, you know.
It’s called operant conditioning and designed to make them submit to being a victim of predators and tyrants both in and outside of government employment.
Not exactly a legitimate educational process. It’s actually child abuse.
When I was a kid I got a full sized toy M-14. Brought it to school. It “fired” full auto too. Last summer I bought a Winchester Model 70 in 300 win mag for my self retirement gift. Now I think I should have bought a Springfield M-1A instead.
I think I was about 8 or 9 when I got my first real gun, a .22 Remington pump. I was around 14 when I got my first pistol. I ordered it from an ad on the back of a comic book. Before that I had I don’t know how many cap guns and BB guns. When I got my rifle, my dad had a friend, a WWII Marine vet teach me how to use and care for it. In High School I took two years of ROTC. We drilled with M-1s. Our instructors taught us how to break them down and clean them. This came in real handy when I joined the Marines. In boot camp, we drilled and qualified with M-14s but in ITR, (Infantry Training) they gave us M-1s that seemed to be WWII rejects. After the first live fire, about 6 of us that had ROTC detail stripped ours and cleaned them. Others around us were telling us we couldn’t do that and that we would get in trouble. The next day ours were the only ones that could get off more than one round at a time. That night we had lines in front of our bunks begging us to “fix” their rifles!
While in the Marine Corps I went on a Carrib cruise. One of our guys smuggled aboard an M-16 look alike squirtgun. He actually fell out in a formation with it. The only reason anyone noticed was because it was about 4 inches shorter that the real M-16s the rest of us had.
So,I’m guessing a toy hand grenade paperweight would be out of the question?
Can we see the real birth cert?