Toy Firearms are Signs of a By-Gone Era of Childhood Innocence

On May 7^{th ,} CNN.com carried a link to this Green Bay, WI story about youth and firearms. “The recent shooting of a student by police outside a school in Mount Horeb has Green Bay district leaders warning families about toy guns.”

According to CNN “On Monday, Green Bay school district leaders sent a letter to families of middle and high school students. The letter warns of the risks of using toy guns — specifically Orbeez guns — on school property”

The story proceeds, “explains Chris Collar, the district’s Safety and Security Manager. “But some of these weapons can shoot them at a high rate of speed, so depending on how close you are to the person you’re shooting there can be injuries that occur.”

[segu] Childhood innocence of the 2020s is disparate from that which silver-haired people of the early 1980s or 1990s remember. A glance though rose-tinted memory convinces us that childhood during the 1980 and 1990s was less perilous and more innocent than during the 2020s. Twenty-five years after the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, CO. Childhood, and innocence have changed in morose ways.

Today mass shootings are perverse in their seeming to commonness, rural or conservative. In the U.S. conservatives carry a perverse and bizarre fetish for AR15 and similar firearms. Many connote them to their culture and individual selves. When youngsters get access, oft illegally, to firearms, toy firearms are no longer innocent. Law enforcement officers can seldom tell a toy gun from a real one in the instant, which one has to respond the threat. 

Somehow youngsters see the notion of ending a conflict via gunfire as more attractive or reasonable than via talking.

According to that story link at CNN com in early May, “Last week, police fatally shot a 14-year-old boy outside Mount Horeb Middle School. Over the weekend, investigators said the boy was armed with a long-barrel pellet gun outside the school.”

Having once been a boy and been drawn to and played with toy firearms I don’t know what draws boys to them. Being a city man, and having dealt with firearms fewer than a handful of times, I feel neither love nor a fetish for them.

Making me even stranger to readers, in middle age I’m more awed buy what diplomats can accomplish by listening than “badass” soldiers can with a firearm.

For a school to ward off and warn youngsters away from surprisingly dangerous “toy” firearms is sensible.