Toy Guns

Recently, a six-year-old boy brought a toy gun jus’ a little larger than a quarter onto a school bus in Palmer, Massachusetts and immediately found himself in trouble for violating the districts zero-gun policy. The school sent a letter home  saying he must to write an apology and attend detention and was facing bus suspension.

In 1967, when I was seven-years-old, I took a pair of pearl-handed, silver six-shooter cap guns to Margaret Keating School in Klamath, and wore them most of the day in my genuine plastic, brown cowboy holsters. The only time my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Lennie Newquist took them away from me was because I kept playing with them when I should have been doing my school work.

Fortunately, the six-year-old wasn’t punished. This came after school officials took the time to review the bus’ surveillance footage and concluded none of the children or even the bus driver were distressed over seeing the toy gun.

I grew up in a much better time.