But anyway, I'm not here to laugh at you (at least, not to your face). I'm here to complain about how hard it is to find a toy gun these days. I went to a Halloween party yesterday, and decided to dress up as a disgruntled postal worker. So I had the postal worker aspect of the costume all set. All I needed was a toy uzi. You know, one of those three-dollar plastic deals that made a gun-like rattling noise when you squeezed the trigger and came with a florescent red piece of plastic on the tip that conveyed the message, "Hey! Don't shoot me! This florescent red piece of plastic clearly indicates this is not a real gun!" Or if not that, it at least communicated "Hey! I'm a really really easy-to-spot target!"
So I wandered down to my local toy store, my local costume store, my local drug store, my local arms dealers... and nothing. Not a single fake plastic uzi in the entire city. Now, granted, I live in an especially socially-conscious city. If I were in Texas, this whole process would have been much easier. But apparently, toy stores don't want to sell toy guns to children any more. This is all based on the universally accepted idea that Everybody Younger Than You Is a Total Moron (just ask any senior citizen). A correlation of this theory is that young children's minds are not shaped by their parents, their education, or the environment they grow up in, but by the toys they play with. So if you give them a gun, they'll grow up into adults that shoot each other. I know many poor youth who grew up in the time of Transformers and received serious bodily injuries trying to fold themselves into a car.
Of course, these stores that don't sell toy uzis anymore still go around selling swords and battle-axes. This seemed rather odd to me, because at least if you have kids shooting each other with imaginary bullets, the only potential for real bodily injury comes when you start getting into fist fights over whether the imaginary bullets hit you or not. With play swords and ninja weapons, you've got kids smacking each other in the face with chunks of plastic.
But maybe I'm not the greatest judge of what's good and bad for children these days. I never really understood the rules that went into action/adventure cartoons. These rules, in case you didn't notice are:
If you ask me, the most dangerous influence on children is the movie Peter Pan. I mean, think about it. The story revolves around these kids who decide to jump out of a 20th story building because this strange guy in green tights tells them they can fly. If I were a parent, I wouldn't be showing this to my kids until they had a very firm grasp on the concept of gravity.
Of course, maybe I'm just bitter because I had to go around yesterday explaining to people that I was going to be a disgruntled postal worker, but because I couldn't find a fake uzi, I had to be just a mildly annoyed postal worker who went around giving people wedgies, or spitting in the mail, or something like that.
On second thought, though, I probably shouldn't go around making fun of a tragedy like that. I mean, it's kind of sad and kind of scary. What kind of guy thinks it's okay to open fire on a room full of people?
Well, apparently, it's somebody who's watched too many Saturday-morning cartoons.