“Crackdown on illegal toy guns,” the headline intoned. I literally did a double take, convinced I could not possibly have read that correctly. “Illegal toy guns?” I thought. “What is this, a George Carlin routine?” The reality is, though, that this is no joke. New York’s Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is going after retailers for selling realistic-looking toy guns. He’s sent cease and desist letters to more than 100 retailers, demanding they stop selling this contraindicated technology.
Toys, you see, are an aspect, a category, of technology. The more advanced a society’s level of technological advancement, the more elaborate are its toys. “Technology-enabled” toys are more prevalent than ever.
As often as not, especially in a society that is increasingly corrupt, toys may become scapegoats. People who should know better will blame toys for the actions of human beings. These actions include the failure of parents to raise their children properly. They also include the corrosive influence of popular culture on kids whose parents are trying desperately to prevent that damage from being done.
A unique collision of politicking and parenting occurs when considering one specific category of toys, and that is toy guns. This was not always so. As a boy, I owned a large arsenal of toy guns. Many a game of “war” or “police” was played in and around my childhood homes and at the homes of my friends. Replica guns were a fact of life, readily available in every store that sold toys.
Through the ensuing years, however, as popular culture has sought to delegitimize gun ownership and equate it with vice, toy guns have come under fire by the arbiters of political correctness. More and more parents forbid their children from having toy guns, believing they are protecting their kids from harmful influences. Of course, they also believe they are protecting their children from imminent death. The appearance of a toy gun in your child’s hands will, according to our media, prompt the nearest law enforcement officer to draw his service piece and start spraying lead indiscriminately.
It is through appeals to your child’s safety that the powers that are seek to control and to ban realistic-looking toy guns. They claim that when such toys aren’t causing police officers to gun down your children mistakenly, fake guns that look “too real” are used to commit crimes such as muggings and robbery. What is always ignored in these hysterical pleas is that replica guns that look like real guns are already illegal. According to the auction site eBay, since 1988 it has been a violation of federal law to make or sell realistic-looking firearms toys that do not have a permanently affixed “blaze orange” plug in the barrel. For 20 years, you have not been able to buy, legally, a toy gun that does not have a giant orange plastic knob sprouting from it.
Where technology, in this case the technology of toys, is scapegoated is in blaming the toys themselves for the actions of human beings. I was taught from an early age that to wave even a toy gun at a police officer was a dangerously stupid act. For that matter, crimes committed with guns are crimes not because guns exist, but because people willing to do violence exist. Instead of fruitlessly and pointlessly targeting toys (or, in the case of firearms, targeting gun ownership), we should be targeting and punishing the reckless actions of human beings that cause accidents and crimes to occur. There is no such thing as an immoral tool or an immoral toy; there are only immoral tool and toy users.
This fact has done nothing to stem the tide of foolish laws banning inanimate objects. According to Fox News, “despite years of enforcement stings,” many stores – at least in New York State – still sell these presumably potentially deadly, look-alike toy guns, which are even now sitting insidiously in their packaging, just waiting to prey on your children. Stop and think about that for a moment. Enforcement stings? For toys? If that doesn’t strike you as a dystopian left turn into the twilight zone of absurd totalitarian government, I don’t know what would. The implication is that we have law enforcement officials, people who could be spending their time solving real crimes and apprehending genuinely violent offenders, wasting their time interdicting an illicit traffic in toy guns. Why does this not strike a majority of voting Americans as ridiculous?
The lion’s share of the problem can again be laid at the feet of our relentlessly sensational media, which would have you believe that toy guns represent a real and present danger to your child. This report even features a table-top display of toy guns that mimics the types of photo-ops in which authorities engage when they recover weapons during a bust. The difference here is that the guns lying on the table aren’t guns at all, but toys – and of course each and every one of those toys has been angled away from the camera to make the bright and obvious orange plugs in the barrels all but invisible in the photograph. These petty acts of yellow journalism have a cumulative effect. They’ve convinced you that the toy your child plays with is every bit as immoral as the gun after which that toy is modeled – and that there is no legitimate reason to own either one.
Toy guns are toys. They cannot warp your child’s psyche or turn him or her into a murderer. You might choose not to give them to your child, and that’s fine. They can be used responsibly, and they can also be used foolishly and dangerously. A toy gun can be pointed menacingly at a police officer – and a rolling, colorful ball can be followed into traffic. It is people, not their tools or their toys, who bear the responsibility for their actions.
Blaming technology for human misbehavior is morally misguided. Banning toys and then believing you’re fighting for safety or against crime is just stupid.
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WND Staff