Toy Gun Buyback = Thought Control

"When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community." -Adolf Hitler

Those of us who grew up on TV Westerns and heroic cinema fare like Sands of Iwo Jima are way too far gone for the anti-gunners. We love guns, believe fervently that owning and using them is our God-given right and that those who would take them from us are little better than the historical figure quoted above.

No, they plant their hopes on the younger set, a group nourished on hip-hop,-travel soccer teams and unisex bathrooms for transgendered elementary schoolers. So it should be no surprise at all that an elementary school in, where else, California is holding a "toy gun buy-back," tempting kids to trade in their squirt guns and Nerf ball shooters for books and a chance to win a bike.

Strobridge Elementary School in Hayward, a town south of Oakland, held a Safety Day last Saturday at which students were urged to turn in their peashooters and to be lectured by a local cop on bike and gun safety. Fingerprinting and photographing of children was on offer, giving the youngsters the chance to experience what it will be like when the 4th Amendment follows the 2nd into the dustbin of history.

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Strobridge Elementary Principal Charles Hill said the Safety Day was necessary because children who play with toy guns may not take real guns seriously.

"Playing with toys guns, saying 'I'm going to shoot you,' desensitizes them, so as they get older, it's easier for them to use a real gun," Hill said.

Yih-Chau Chang, spokesman for Responsible Citizens of California, responded "Having a group of children playing cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians is a normal part of growing up." At least it was until recently.

Chang took a remarkably charitable view of the proceedings: "While the intentions are obviously good on the part of the school administration, this doesn't really educate children about guns or gun safety,"

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Nope, Mr. Chang, the intentions of the school administration are not good at all. Their intention is indoctrination, something our educrats find infinitely more compelling than preparing their little charges to hold a job one day.

Buy-backs (and don't we hate that term?) of actual guns do pretty much nothing about crime guns other than giving criminals a chance to be rid of them with no questions asked. They mainly round up old bolt-action shotguns and top-break revolvers owned by the elderly. There's no great harm in that unless you're an avid collector of Foremost or Hawthorne or J.C. Higgins guns.

The harm resides in the term "buy-back," which implies that somehow these wayward firearms are returning to their rightful owner, the state. If impressionable children can be conditioned to think even their squirt guns are ultimately state property, then liberty as we have known it is lost. Photographed and fingerprinted, they can grow up to be passive subjects of an all-seeing, all-knowing state. And that's the real purpose of the Strobridge Safety Day.