By proposing a ban on toy guns, unless they’re painted pink, white or orange.

Welcome to life in a one-party town.

The city of St. Paul is moving to ban realistic toy guns, which give police officers nightmares and have led to several deaths in the Twin Cities and across the nation.

Under a draft ordinance, the City Council would outlaw the public display of weaponry that substantially duplicates a real firearm — unless the toy is completely white, pink, yellow or some other bright color.

The ordinance, expected to be introduced next week, also would require toys to have a blaze orange extension extending at least six millimeters beyond the muzzle. The extensions are required by federal law, but are frequently removed.

The measure would ban laser pointers on toy guns.

The rationale, of course, is that cops might mistake a toy gun for a real one, or vice versa.

Of course, banning toy guns or restricting their colors isn’t even a stopgap measure for the “problem” (and the scare quotes aren’t entirely appropriate – every so often someone does get shot while holding a toy gun). 

Councilman Lee Helgen skirts perilously close to an answer:

“I think we will really be leading the nation in how we deal with these non-lethal firearms,” said Council Member Lee Helgen, who is sponsoring the measure. “We have to treat them with the exact same care you would any other firearm. … You can’t tell the difference between a real weapon and these toy handguns.”

And the answer to that is education.  Teaching kids how to act around guns – in a society where kids know the John Woo grip before they know their ABCs, thanks to a liberal Hollywood that glorifies violence even as it pours megabucks into gun control advocacy groups – would help a lot.  But thanks to post-Columbine hysteria, whispering “gun” in a school is likely to get the place locked down and a SWAT team going medieval on your tush – and the political hysteria over the gun issue has meant that the one non-military group in America with a long, successful history of teaching kids about gun safety, the NRA, is frozen out of the picture.

And so we make sure kids carry pink guns.

I feel safer already.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 9:22 am and is filed under St. Paul, Victim Disarmament. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.