News from the Nanny State

My sons are rough and tumble boys in the playful sense. They like sports, pizza and cartoons. They like action figures and running over Barbies with their trucks, you know, boy stuff. They are also, as you can imagine, very hard on toys. Once a month I sift through their toy bins to discard the broken items. One item in need of being tossed was a plastic toy shot gun my son bought with his own allowance money.

Now, I wasn't crazy about my kids having toy guns. Actually, there was a time when I had a hard and fast "not even squirt guns" rule. But, being a parent, I have found that the more fervently I refuse an item to my children, the greater their fascination with it. So I relented and allowed my son to purchase a cowboy revolver set with his chore money about a year ago. He was six at the time, old enough to be taught the seriousness of what a weapon meant. Over the year, he would patiently save his money for other toys: a ninja set, some Bakugan, and on a month when the Tooth Fairy made extra stops to our house, he purchased a plastic shot gun from the Family Dollar I had run into for tape for last minute Christmas gift wrapping. Now toys being what they are and my boys being what they are, the gun didn't last the week. It stayed taped together for the next month until another play mishap broke it further and made it un-mendable. My son was heart-broken. So I set out to find another, better quality version.

I first went to Wal-Mart. Usually, I hate this place, but I had seen them there in the past. Their creditor is GE Money Bank- a division of General Electric. This soul-less financial bohemoth had its grubby fingerprints all over the Cap and Trade legislation. Think about that the next time you see their big displays of mercury-filled fluorescent bulbs! Anyway...

I couldn't locate them, so I asked an employee, "We don't carry anything like that anymore. Just the Nerf guns and squirt guns." Huh? I checked other Wal-Mart stores, no toy guns. Today, I was in Lexington and thought I would hit up Toys R Us.

While looking, my husband and I twice attempted to flag down an employee who was actively avoiding us. When we were able to corner him, he informed us that Toys R Us had made it company policy that they did not sell anything that remotely resembled a real gun. I am not sure when it became bad for our children to aspire to be a policeman or a soldier, but I respect that a private business has the right to make its own policies { And I also have the right as a consumer to tell them to get bent.]

The employee suggested one store and then also suggested Wal-Mart. When I informed him that we had already been there and they had stopped selling them, he smiled and said, “Good for Wal-Mart.” and walked away. My husband, stunned by his insult, asked, “Excuse me?” The employee never turned around or explained his remark.

I would like to humbly remind everyone that the first move of a Communist regime is to disarm its citizens. Like the Constitution, much of our history is being erased from our children's education. Progressives are now attempting to erase gun ownership from the American psyche. They know that they haven't got a chance in Hell of getting adults to relinquish their guns, especially not now. So, they're giving our children a little push.


Or as Cass Sunstein refers to it, a nudge.