When Men weren't Boys, and Boys weren't Girls ...

... And children imagined that, one day, they should be something called "grown-ups", capable of making "grown-up" decisions about "grown-up" things:



Now what've we got?

"We need to stress to our children that guns are not toys, but deadly weapons which should always be regarded with extreme caution and handled with respect," Scutari said. "Restricting access to imitation firearms will help to drive that point home." [...]

If the measure is enacted, New Jersey would join several states that have restricted access to realistic toy guns to minors.

... What sublime absurdity that we should think it progressive that certain toys only be made available to those who have just crossed the threshold into adulthood!

Chesterton bellows from the grave:

When this progress has gone on for a century or two, it might begin to dawn on people that there was something wrong with their moral principle. What is wrong with their moral principle is that it is immoral. Arms, like every other adventure of art of man, have two sides according as they are invoked for the infliction or the defiance of wrong. They have also an element of real poetry and an element of realistic and therefore repulsive prose. The child's symbolic sword and bow are simply the poetry without the prose; the good without the evil. The toy sword is the abstraction and the emanation of the heroic, apart from all its horrible accidents. It is the soul of the sword, that will never be stained with blood.