Democrats Move to Sissify Toy Guns Even Further

Minority Democrats in the Senate are urging swift action from the Consumer Products Safety Commission. We have a crisis on our hands, folks. Children’s toy guns do not look nerdy or sissified enough. If firearms look cool or realistic, children might find them to be appealing or fun. That in turn could cause them to grow up respecting the Second Amendment and actually wanting to support that right. And this must not stand!

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who was somehow never indicted for his “Livin’ La Vida Epstein” lifestyle in the Dominican Republic, is leading the charge against kids in America being allowed to have toy guns that are appealing. Toy guns are already regulated to the point where they must look stupid, but Menendez says this doesn’t go far enough. According to Menendez, “ASTM F589-17, Standard Consumer Safety Specification for Non-Powder Guns” must be amended some more, before any children accidentally have some fun.

Under current regulations, toy guns are already required to have an orange plug in the end of the barrel, or they must “be brightly colored singly or in combination with specified colors, have an orange marking on the barrel’s exterior, or be made fully of transparent or translucent materials.”

My own childhood would probably make a modern school administrator faint on the spot. Maybe yours was similar, if you’re a red-blooded American boy.

We couldn’t wait for the recess bell every day at school. As soon as the bell rang, out came the guns. My favorites – because there were many, many guns I took to school with me in kindergarten and first grade – were a set of pearl-handled, silver-barreled Colt six-shooters. Every boy in class brought their guns to school, every single day.

We had three games that we would play at recess. There was “Cops and Robbers,” in which we divided up into two teams and proceeded to shoot each other. There was never actually any robbery that took place; it was just a gunfight that happened after the Robbers had already perpetrated some crime.

The second was the politically incorrect “Cowboys and Indians.” We didn’t mean anything unkind or insensitive by this. We just needed two separate teams of naturally opposed enemies and didn’t know any other such groups than Cops vs. Robbers and Cowboys vs. Indians. It was just as cool to be an Indian as it was to be a Cop or a Robber; the objective was simply to shoot the other team.

The third variation was a free-for-all with no teams, which we called “War.” It was more of a last-man-standing variety of game. The point is that most of us had a very realistic looking (to us) arsenal in our desk at school. If you opened a desk on any given day, it would look like Mad Max had dropped his stash off with you before entering Thunderdome.

No one said boo to us. No one got expelled for bringing a toy gun to school. All of us brought toy guns to school. And no one ever committed a school shooting. Most of our parents had loaded, unsecured guns at home and we knew exactly where they were (usually right beside the front door). It never would have occurred to us to bring a real gun to school. We all knew that our dads would kill us if we even touched the real guns.

Toy guns obviously were not a problem that led to school shootings. Did toy guns glamorize real guns for us? Of course. Because guns are awesome. But if you want to look at common factors that lead to mass shootings or school shootings, it’s obviously not the proliferation of toy guns. I already gave away the answer in the last paragraph, for those who are paying attention: “Our dads would kill us.”

Out of the 27 worst mass shooters in US history, 26 of them were raised without a father in the home. The mass shootings are just a symptom of a sickness that is permeating our society. If you want to stop mass shootings or school shootings, making children’s guns look even more foolish is not the answer. But then real solutions are something that a guy like Sen. Menendez isn’t interested in talking about.