Toying With Gun Control

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Toying With Gun Control
September 8, 2011

Nerf guns and water pistols are the latest target for the gun grabbers. Community activists in Buffalo, N.Y., started a toy-buyback program on Monday designed to instill a fear of firearms in the city’s youth. It’s also a way to accustom children to the real restrictions they’re likely to encounter in adulthood.

As reported in the Buffalo News, a group calling itself Fathers Armed Together to Help Educate Restore and Save and a local pizza joint are rewarding toddlers willing to trade in a plastic assault rifle with a delicious slice of pizza. They hope it’s an offer too good to refuse.

There’s little need to dwell on the absurdity of such a scheme. It’s more useful in providing insight into the liberal mind that sees the availability of guns as the direct cause of murder and mayhem on the streets. They believe such problems will disappear if handguns are banned. If only it were that simple.

One need look no further than last month’s rioting in London to see that violence and chaos do not end when the populace has been disarmed. At least 100 homes burned to the ground, and shopkeepers watched helplessly as their businesses were pillaged and their livelihoods destroyed. London's Metropolitan Police issued a 13-point list of “crime prevention” tips that boiled down to a few basic recommendations: Remove valuable items from view, fire up closed-circuit surveillance cameras and call the police emergency number when the rioters arrive. Not that placing one of the 20,800 calls received in a night would have done much good. By the time the bobbies restored order, damage estimates exceeded $300 million.

When chaos hit the streets of Los Angeles in 1992, police beat a hasty retreat. Shop owners in Asian neighborhoods, by contrast, took matters into their own hands. They organized themselves and stood watch from rooftops with their personal rifles, shotguns and pistols. They opened fire on local gangs and approaching looters, enabling the good guys to end the day with their places of business unmolested and their lives spared.

Leftists prefer everyone to become victims. Allowing good people to defend themselves requires the intolerant admission that there’s a difference between good and evil. It’s safer for them to put all of their reliance upon government and blame society when the state isn’t up to the task.

That’s why more and more children today are denied the pleasure of playing traditional games like cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers. Their baseball games aren’t scored so that everyone can be declared a “winner.” Grades are inflated or not kept, and everyone is promoted. At the head of this movement one finds the California Assembly, which held a committee debate Tuesday on Senate-passed legislation that would regulate the acceptable colors for BB guns. Squirt-gun registration can’t be far behind.

Instead of taking toys from tots, it’s time to restore the culture of personal responsibility embodied in the responsible use of firearms.