Michigan’s Orange Tip Toy Gun Law: When Legislators Have Too Much Time on Their Hands

Conservatism 101: D.I.Y. Political Education

Is Michigan the Common Sense Graveyard: the state where the unhinged go to die? The latest law proposal from the state which gave the nation Detroit–where the phrase “extreme urban blight” originated–is both surreal and startling. Does the Michigan legislature have too much time on their hands? Da Tool Guy has the goods in this week’s Conservative 101.

CIVICS FOR THE MASSES

A Michigan bill would make it illegal to cut the orange tip off a toy gun so that it was more realistic, according to a Fox News story:

The bill, S.B. 779, which could be voted upon in the Senate as early as Thursday, would amend Michigan the law to penalize the use of an imitation firearm in a crime if its required colored markings are removed, disguised or concealed. If passed, the bill would also ban real firearms from being doctored to look like a toy.

Seriously?

With Michigan more or less in the crapper, Detroit actually shrinking it’s borders — the first time I’ve ever heard of a major metro doing that — and this is what the Michigan Legislature is taking it’s time with?

They claim, of course, it’s to protect the children. Wouldn’t want the little nippers shot by accident when waving a toy gun around in public.

I suppose there’s some legitimate concern there, but I seem to recall staging wars with toy guns all over the neighborhood when I was a kid with some pretty realistic looking toys and I never got shot.

Granted times were different, but seriously, where are the parents?

Would seem to me they ought to be making clear — as I did with my children — you don’t point guns at people. And that pointing even a toy gun at a cop is a monumentally stupid idea and an automatic Darwin Award nomination.

Of course our society has gotten so bloody stupid, so utterly dependent that apparently it does take legislation for these sorts of things since the parents are too busy.

They’re too busy either being their kid’s “friends” or abdicating all possible responsibility for them to the state in the form of he schools to actually, you know, parent.

My daddy never had to tell me not to point a toy gun at an armed man, that just seemed to follow from his admonition that if I ever pointed a real gun at anyone my life had better be in danger and I had better pull the trigger — or don’t point it at all.

I also knew what would happen if I did something my mother or father didn’t like when they weren’t around — I’d get my backside beat.

Now parents and children both or so devoid of common sense, let alone anything resembling intelligence that one set of idiots in a state capital has to tell the rest of the state’s morons that making a toy gun look like a real one and pointing it at people is a bad idea and might get you shot.

Plus we apparently needed a new law to make it a crime to fool people into thinking you had a gun when you didn’t while committing a crime.

Here in Kansas we have a simple solution to that. If you use a toy gun to rob a store and the clerk thought it was real, well it’s still armed robbery. Intent, you see?

But in a Democrat-controlled state like Michigan I guess that was probably too easy.

I weep for my country.

by DaToolGuy
images: dbkp file; hubpages

DaToolGuy is a small town journalist with big time dreams. He’s spent his entire adult life laboring in the obscurity he actually deserves. But he’ll take the opportunity to show off when it comes.

DaToolGuy writes regularly at View from Flyover Country.

DaToolGuy in another incarnation of nationally-known blogger Patrick Richardson, contributor to PJMedia and editor at the Otherwhere Gazette.

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