Pat Oliphant for March 20, 2013

If you don’t think the movie industry has had an effect on the kids with their shoot em up movies and video games, check out the attached link. These rifles are obviously scaled down in size but they are very accurate in their design.**http://www.kids-army.com/ak-47-assault-rifle/

So, make this furriner understand: you have this zero tolerance policy for primary school kids making nonsensical decisions, and some of you have this idea that more guns should be in school to prevent another Newtown-like massacre?Ahem. Y(our) society appears to be suffering a multiple personality disorder.

@ mickey1339 In a playpark once, we saw a youngster, about age 7, with a small rubber or plastic dagger, about 15cms/6 inches long, playing some “catch-’em” game with his mates. A few of them had the usual pistols and the like. My wife & I raised our eyebrows as at times they were very aggressive but left them well alone as their parents were watching and kept our kid well away. But what we were astounded by was when later, in the usual scuffle & shoving for a place at the slide, the kid repeatedly stabbed another kid, who had shoved his way in front of him, with his rubber/plastic dagger. I had to step in to prevent the 2nd kid getting injured. Nary a reproving word from the aggressor’s mother.Now, kids will use twigs & branches and pretend they’re rifles, guns, swords or knives; I get that. We’ve been doing that since year dot, emulating our past need to hunt etc.

I get it that zero tolerance policies are designed to make kids understand that weapons are bad, even pretend ones. But when we, as a society, make toy weapons to look so realistic, allow our kids to enact games where hand to hand combat is emulated (sword play can be included), never-mind distant non-personal killing (guns), but at the same time in our schools then tell them it is bad to draw guns, or make our fingers or pop tarts look like guns…what exactly are we telling our kids?

I know: That our primary school teachers should be armed, too. :-|

??? yet…

Assault weapons are illegal. Maybe it is just an evil looking semi-auto similar to those invented near the beginning of the 20th century.

Richard S. Russell said, about 7 hours ago

When I was in high school (early 1960s) and deer-hunting season rolled around, guys would bring their rifles into school to stash them in their lockers, rather than leave them out in their cars and trucks. They could get in a couple of hours in the woods after class. Nobody thot twice about students walking the halls carrying guns. Perfectly normal._______________________________

I was also in high school in the early Sixties, an’ you’re exactly correct about that…In those days, people’s fears were focused on the USSR, missiles, even nearby Cuba…but they weren’t giving a second thought to youngsters “going Columbine” in the halls of local schools.It just might be that even in the turbulent an’ sometimes scary Sixties, our society was more sane an’ rational fifty years ago than it is today – perhaps substantially so.Even with ‘lone nuts’ publicly killing our national leaders with guns over an’ over in the Sixties (JFK, MLK, RFK) as well as our nation being deep in a foreign war in southeast Asia that was fought with guns, people did not have the fear of each other then that exists today – especially with regard to personal firearms.Political Correctness – that insidious cultural cancer that is ravaging the ‘body’ of our society – has had a hand in all of this…judicially, we’ve turned the tables on ourselves, an’ enhanced the rights of the criminal element, while stripping the victims of much of their rights, except for the potential ‘financial consideration’ available through often preposterous litigation with the ‘help’ of “as seen on TV” lawyers – thus further bogging down an overloaded judicial system full of judges with highly questionable judgement, ethics, an’ qualifications.

Your point is valid; perfectly normal to carry a deer rifle, mostly a bolt-action .30-06 or maybe a lever-action .30-30. However, we wouldn’t have seen the semi-auto high capacity anywhere.

I think we should all have portable atomic weapons when they become available.

‘I’ll take our way of life. If you don’t like it, fine; don’t come.

I think you’ll find that many of your compatriots have issues with guns being taken into schools. Ignore me by all means, but they don’t much like your way of life. ;-)

Those hunting rifles were not loaded – no sportsman would carry a loaded gun anywhere but in the field. “Show and tell” guns were exclusively antiques, many (like the Rimmington .41 derringer I showed) you could not even get ammunition for.

“We don’t kill people who don’t believe the same way as other people.”

Would that that were true. Tell it to Matthew Sheppard, who was beaten and tied to a fence post to die because he was gay. Tell it to the guy who was tied behind a yay-hoo’s pick-em-up truck in Texas and dragged to death because he was black. Tell it to the family whose 81-year-old patriarch was beaten and kicked to death when he went outside to get some fresh air during his daughter’s wedding reception in Virginia, because a few thirteen-year-olds thought it would raise their esteem in the eyes of 13-year-old girls. Tell that to Gabby Giffords. Tell it to the family of the guy in Arizona whose wife ran over him because she didn’t like the way he voted last November. Tell it to the family of the woman in New York whose fiancee shot her to death because she made a bad bid in a bridge game.

And what about Alexander Hamilton? Wasn’t he killed in a duel resulting from differing political opinions?

GD right. These kids have the RIGHT to their weapons. And it would be ridiculous to pass a law against it because nobody would obey them! Sovsays GOP.

how about that new 40mm sniper rifle in case its a gang raid

Good one. The schools must be secure,.