Laaaaawww the doooo daaaaa daaaaay

There is so much fail in every paragraph in this article that I don't know where to begin:

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck is proposing that the
city require BB-gun replicas of actual firearms to be brightly colored so that
police officers don't mistake them for real weapons.

Hmmm. Chief Beck seems to have been raised a little different than I was; when I was a wee tike, my parents warned me that my BB gun was just as dangerous as a firearm, and could very easily maim or kill if not treated with the utmost respect - i.e. the four rules of gun safety. Breaking those rules with my air rifle was grounds for an immediate and savage ass kicking, and rightly so.

The guns come in various models that closely resemble real weapons such as Berettas, shotguns and pistols. Law enforcement experts say the toys can easily be mistaken for the real thing, especially in a situation in which an officer must react quickly and decisively.

As I just noted above, BB guns should be treated as the real thing - a firearm, unless the guns the law is addressing are airsoft guns. Police and military practice different shooting scenarios with airsoft guns, they just don safety glasses for obvious reasons, which they would have to do even if they used rubber band guns. They do not practice with BB guns or pellet rifles, which fire copper plated balls or cast lead projectiles. The Law Enforcement Expert probably just forgot to mention that part. If it's just toys they're worried about, I can at least see their point; but for all I can tell, they want Red Ryder BB guns and the like painted a conspicuous color, which I think is a bad idea in every regard. You don't want children to get the idea that a weapon that fires hard projectiles is a toy, and do not want them making bad habits with it.

Here is a part of the article that would have made me blow coffee out of my nose had I been drinking it at the time:

Salay said he had asked his daughter Ashley, 12, to try to purchase the guns because he wanted to see if vendors would sell them to her. She was able to buy several guns from the ice cream trucks, he said, two of which had warnings on them that they were intended for ages 18 and older.

"At an ice cream truck, there is no parent who can say 'no, no, no, you can't have that,' " said Salay, who also teaches gun safety to Boy Scouts. "To sell a 12-year-old girl a gun that looks like a real gun is a tragedy waiting to happen. And now it has happened."

Yeah, I totally disregard the safety of my children when around ice cream vendors; they're like a fucking tractor beam that steals your common sense when you get too close. Sometimes when walking downtown with my kids, they see something in the window of a store on the other side of the street that they want really really bad, and I am forced to defy my better judgement and let their little hands slip from my grasp so they can run to the other side of the street. There's no way to say no because they're so excited.

The other day as a matter of fact I was in Wal-Mart and noticed how easy it was for anyone - even kids - to buy sodium hypochlorite from the pool department, even though you should probably be at least 18 years old to even touch the stuff. When you turn 18 you are gifted suddenly with mastery of not getting killed by doing something ignorant, so it only makes sense. Anyways, the pool bleach was ridiculously close to the beach toys, right on the other side of the aisle, so to make a point about how dangerous that is I gave my daughter a fistful of dollars and had her buy one of those cup sized sand castle molds, a one pound bag of granulated chlorine, and some Deer Park and then had her mix up a liquid elixir while sitting next to the disabled employee handing out smiley face stickers next to the door. It was an insightful lesson for my daughter to learn, and no doubt puts the final nail in the coffin for Wal Mart selling dangerous items to kids. Next I'm going to have her pick up a hatchet, machete, and an axe from Lowe's as a lesson that edged weapons and tools are not toys, and then perhaps I will have her buy some methamphetamine from the crackhead next to the old elementary school so that she can see that mind altering narcotics shouldn't be so readily available.

Man, I'm going to be a hit at my first parent/teacher conference!

What this all boils down to is that cops really don't want to mistakenly shoot a kid wielding a plastic Mattelle gun, so I can see that, but I don't see how a city law making Mattelle paint their toys that go to Los Angeles is going to remedy the issue. It certainly isn't going to compel a homeless parolee to paint his soap-sculptured Glock titty-pink so as to not run counter to city ordnance, but it might make a couple of gang bangers paint their Hi Points a bright color to give a cop pause before they start firing on him. As far as I know, toy gun manufacturers are already held to federal law when it comes to blaze orange paint, so there has to be something else going on that we don't know about. Either way, it's a good thing Los Angeles has all of their budget issues and violent crime problems taken care of so that they can instead focus on the things that really matter.