Today, the wife and I went antique store lookin’. And I sure enough saw an antique.
It was a little box. Brightly colored, in red, white, and blue. ROLL CAPS FOR HANDGUNS, it said.
Used to be, you could get those for a dime in any dime store in the country.
I examined the box. There wasn’t any clear explanation of exactly why you needed roll caps for a handgun… or, for that matter, any safety warning, despite the fact that the box clearly stated that it was a gunpowder product.
Of course, this particular little box was a relic of another time, back before the Safety Nazis and the Association Of People Who Want To Make The World Safe For Stupid People With Lawyers succeeded in their crusade to have warning labels put on every stinkin’ thing in creation.
Anyone who knew anything about Back Then could have told you what these things were. They were a form of children’s toy.
Roll caps were intended to be rigged inside toy pistols… known to we who dwelt in ancient times as “cap pistols.” You threaded them through the works, and when you pulled the trigger, the hammer would fall on one of the little brown blisters full of gunpowder, making a loud and satisfying BANG.
Well, not a BANG, per se. More of a loud firecrackery snapping sound. Still, it was much louder and more fun than just pulling the trigger and hearing it click.
If you were feeling bored, you could get Dad’s hammer out, and blast a whole roll of caps to hell with one blow. It made a fine BANG sound, as well as discoloring the concrete beneath it, so you wanted to watch where you pulled this particular trick, but oh, my, it was fun… and you didn’t have to wait until the Fourth Of July to buy caps, either.
As I stood there in the antique store, looking at this box of ancient caps… maybe dating back as far as the seventies, or more… I thought about how one would explain this little box to a denizen of the early 21st Century.
“Yeah, they’re little tabs of gunpowder, on a long red paper roll. Yes, gunpowder. And kids play with them. They stick them in toy FIREARMS, to make the shots sound more like real gunshots.”
I could already hear the horrified gasps of imaginary parents.
“Yeah, I had a cap pistol when I was a kid. Y’know, for playin’ cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, and such. Friend of mine had a REAL neat gun, too… a Lone Ranger gunfighter set… gunbelts made of REAL LEATHER, and little cartridge loops in the back with REAL SILVER BULLETS in ‘em, right? (actually chromed plastic, but what did WE know? We were children…) And you could actually open the revolvers’ cylinders and actually LOAD UP those silver bullets, into the chambers! I mean, those guns were almost REAL! They actually did everything REAL Colt Revolvers did, except actually fire real bullets that made real holes in people!”
And I can hear, across the ether, the horrified gabble of angry mothers, gleeful lawyers, and avaricious child psychiatrists.
When I was a boy, they sold a variety of interesting toys. You could buy most forms of popular ordinance in toy form. I remember Lugers, Broomhandle Mausers, Colt .45s, Browning High Power Automatics, Thompson Submachine guns, a whole slew of M-16s (it was the Vietnam era, after all…), and I even remember toy Garand rifles of real wood with actual working gunbolts… I remember, during the height of the James Bond 007 popularity wave, you could buy a variety of shoulder holsters, toy spring-clips, concealed knives, rockets, and weaponry… even a briefcase that could be rigged to dispense throwing knives, and came with a disassembleable rifle that could be rigged to shoot through the closed briefcase it came in!
Nowadays, when I find myself in the toy aisle at Wal-Mart (which is where, according to statistics, MOST American children get their toys these days)… you aren’t likely to find much in the way of toy guns. Water pistols, molded in colored translucent plastic, is about as close as you’re likely to get to any kind of realistic weaponry. Oh, and large expensive water cannons molded in carnival colors, and which can shoot pressurized water jets powerful enough to nail someone’s cat two houses down the street, or peel the paint off your porch at a range of five feet.
I find this interesting.
I first began to see this line of thinking not long after Vietnam… around 1976 or so… when trends were leaning away from war toys. Even with the Reagan Revolution, when GI Joe quit being an adventurer, and went back to being a high-tech soldier, you didn’t see the massive batteries of toy armaments on the shelves that you used to. They just… weren’t… cool any more.
And nowadays, it’s irrelevant. Bringing toy guns to school these days can get your kid expelled, arrested, and psychoanalyzed, and your fitness as a parent loudly and intimidatingly questioned, publicly. There’s a case on record where a kid was expelled for bringing his GI JOE’S toy pistol to school – a tiny .45 automatic, about an inch long – but still in violation of the school’s “zero tolerance” policy. There’s another one, dating from 2000, where four fourth-grade boys were suspended for running around POINTING at each other, and shouting, “Bang! Bang!”
Pointing with their FINGERS, that is. Zero tolerance is zero tolerance. In an age where teeners can blaze their way into legend and oblivion in a hail of gunfire, school officials take no chances.
Admittedly, the kind of tyranny that this sort of thinking brings about is exactly the sort of thing that makes kids WANT to shoot up a school or two… but, hey, better to be dam’d for DOING something than for doing NOTHING, right? If you’re a school administrator, anyway.
But I stood in that antique store, and looked at that tiny, harmless, carnival-colored box that once held paper and gunpowder, and I thought about it. I never shot up a school. Neither did anyone in my entire generation. And we went to school in TEXAS, durnit! We all HAD guns, and knew how to use them! We all of us, durn near, went hunting with our dads every deer season, dove season, quail season! Heck, some of us didn’t even bother waiting for the season, or with hunting licenses, for that matter!
And it is true that a few of us – a very few, comparitively – wound up using these guns on each other. Each generation has its murderers.
But none of us ever shot up a school. It never occurred to us to do that. None of us.
School shooters are a new breed. Different bunch. They were all born well after Viet Nam, well after the beginning of the Reagan Years… in an age where toy guns weren’t made to look realistic… when they didn’t come with toy bullets, or working gunbolts… and you couldn’t buy roll caps for them. These children grew up without ever seeing the violence of those old cowboys-and-indians movies, where innocent settlers caught arrows in their breasts, and died dramatically, and indians got shot off their horses in record numbers.
Nope. The school shooters were born into a different age… an age of political correctness, an age where televised violence was monitored and discussed and criticized and argued… not taken for granted.
Makes y’think, don’t it?
