toys guns
I am not going to get into a philosophical discussion as to whether of not guns should be legal or not but I would like to come down clearly on the side of outlawing toy guns.
This week in Florida, a Jr High kid brings a gun to school. It was (or would have been) obvious that it was a toy gun but the kid took a magic marker and blacked out the red marks to make it look real. He was successful and he is now brain dead after a cop shot him. If course, the parents and family lawyer can't be far from the court room but who bought this kid a toy gun? Who allowed him to have this gun?
One day I will have a child and when the kid asks me to get him a toy gun, I am not even sure I will acknowledge the question as the stupidity of buying a kid a toy gun is mindboggling. Again, not talking about real guns and teaching the kid to handle them ... I am talking toys.
Cops have no choice. The cop probably wasn't sure it was real but the downside was his buddy cop getting killed. I do not fault him at all. Heck, that cop should sure the parent for the mental duress that this put him under.
I say allow abortion, drugs, firearms for convicted sex offenders ... but seriously, can any one put up a case for junior having a plastic 9MM?
Blog on...
1 Comments:
This is a tough one for me. I was raised by a career military man. My younger brother and I BOTH had toy guns...wooden ones, plastic ones, metal ones, and all the fake knives, grenades, bombs, etc. you can imagine. We played our own little game of "war" with all the other kids on base.
On the other side of things, our parents also taught us respect for the weapons, even as toys. The real guns were locked where we didn't even know they existed and far from the ammunition. We thought our mother was crazy for the rule that even a toy gun could not at all be pointed at a human. Okay, so we broke that rule a few times, but we still grew up with a respectful fear of what real weapons can do. And though I played with the toys when young, I can't say that buying any child of mine a toy weapon would cross my mind. But, if they asked for one, I'd teach the same respect for what can possibly hurt someone, and I'd hope my own teaching would prevent them from taking the thing to school or pointing it at one in even a joking manner just as my brother and I never considered doing.
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