Protecting Children from Harm: It Will Kill Us All

A couple weeks ago I saw a kid wandering around with a toy gun, all brightly colored in blue with a big orange tip. He was shooting it at random things, possibly even "bad guys" in his mind.

I tried playfully ducking behind objects, as if dodging his shots, giving him a real live, moving target to play with. I looked back to enjoy the delight on his face.

Nothing.

He was confounded.

Too well had this child been trained to "Never point guns at people." He didn't even know why he would do such a thing. It doesn't matter that he had a toy gun, or that it could never be mistaken for the real thing. I doubt he had any conception that "bad guys" could also be real people. He simply knew never to engage in this certain behavior, which made my ducking and dipping rather confusing, I suppose.

Well, there goes the future of our armed forces.

When I was little, They had just mandated the little orange tips on toy guns, mostly after plenty of kids got shot dead by on-duty officers who thought they were holding real weapons, pointed their direction.

Hell, I nearly got in trouble in college for holding a B.B. gun in between scenes of a student film. This kind of stuff really happens. But that's all over now.

Along with Scooby-Doo's Velma and Shaggy dating and more than 151 different kinds of Pokémon, guns are now ruined for children.

If not for the counterbalance of adult-sized automatic Nerf guns of disturbingly realistic battle features, I would expect us to be overrun with French legions by 2065.