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Gun control zealots will never be content. The NRA has long said if you give then an inch, they’ll take a mile. This holiday season, Hempstead, N.Y., officials shows just how far they’ll go to prove that the NRA is right.
Remember getting your first BB gun or cap gun? Remember the hours of joy as you ran through the yard tracking down imaginary bad guys, playing cowboys and Indians, and other such things.
Well, Hempstead officials have had enough of that. Besides urging parents that toy guns are not really acceptable gifts—for Christmas or any other time—the town decided to sponsor a “buyback" for all toy guns, from squirt guns and up. Children and parents were invited to swap the offensive toys for something “less dangerous.”
“We don’t want the kids playing with guns,” Hempstead Village Trustee LaMont Jackson told WABC-TV. “Guns are dangerous.”
The angle for getting folks to comply was even more foreboding.
Hempstead Village Police Department Lt. Derek Warner said that parents could be putting their kids' lives at risk by gifting them toy guns for the holidays because police officers can often mistake toy guns for real ones. Yeah, it’s so easy to confuse a colorful squirt gun with a firearm.
Why is it that when people die in car accidents or on bicycles that no one sits there and screams that we must ban Matchbox cars and Tonka trucks, yet harmless toy guns fall prey?
Get real, Hempstead.
