From Jacksonville local news: Jacksonville mother upset after child taught NRA-affiliated gun safety program at elementary school.

The headline just about says it all.  A 7 year old student was taught the NRA’s Eddie the Eagle gun safety program in school.  Normally, parents are given the ability to opt their children out of this program, but somehow this didn’t happen in this case.

The mom found out what happened with her son, when her son came home with the Eddie the Eagle pamphlet, and complained to the superintendent of schools.

“They’ve just undone seven years of parenting in one hour,” the mother, who didn’t want to be identified, said. She said she teaches her 7-year-old that all guns are bad.  She said her son came home with a pamphlet that said otherwise.  “’Mommy, you’re wrong. Toy guns are OK. See, guns are OK, mom. See? It says so right here,” the mother said her son told her.  The mother also doesn’t like that the gun lesson was designed by the NRA. She called it propaganda.

Let’s look at that again.

She said she teaches her 7-year-old that all guns are bad.

That is a totally normal and healthy thing to do, right?  Teach your child than an inanimate object is bad.  This, of course, instills no concept of personal responsibility or accountability.  Nope.  Guns are bad.

Then the kids comes home having learned not to hate and fear an object.

“’Mommy, you’re wrong. Toy guns are OK. See, guns are OK, mom. See? It says so right here.”

I’m pretty sure this boy just wants to play cops and robbers or whatever with his friends and anti-gun mommy won’t let him.  This is his excuse, in paper, to let him have fun with the neighbor kids running around with Super Soakers while he can’t because guns are bad.

I’m reminded of a Shakespearean tragedy I witnessed one day.  Mommy was of the “processed sugar is poison” camp.  The kids are playing, as kids are wont to do, and everybody takes a break for snack time.  One mommy shares cookies with the children, and Sugar Mom takes the cookie away from her child and gives him some veggie chips, chiding her progeny that “cookies have yucky sugar.”  The look of complete, soul crushing, sadness in that boy’s eyes when his chocolate chip cookie was replaced with a dehydrated carrot was heart breaking.

I have the feeling that “seven years of parenting” wasn’t sticking anyway if it could be undone in one hour.  Junior probably had the sneaking suspicion that toy guns aren’t bad from friends at school with their Nerf arsenals.  He just wanted to take part in the fun.

The mother also doesn’t like that the gun lesson was designed by the NRA. She called it propaganda.

Automatic hatred of anything the NRA gets close to.  Gun safety, that’s propaganda.  Telling a child that several ounces of plastic, or a couple of pounds of plastic and steel is the physical manifestation of evil is not.  That is a completely rational position to take.

“It sends a message that Duval is NRA-affiliated,” she said.

Now they are going to have to move out of Duval County, the NRA has gotten it’s evil tentacles into the school system.  Next thing you know, the school will be selling Uzis in the cafeteria next to the chocolate milk.

The real danger in all of this is the contradictory lesson the child learned.  The kid can’t separate real guns and toy guns in his mind.  A seven year old should be able to tell the difference.

These are toys,  NERF, Super Soaker, dart guns, etc.  These are safe to play with.

On the other hand, there are real guns, and those are dangerous.  If you see a real gun, OR if you don’t know it’s a real gun, don’t touch, leave the area, tell an adult.

This was the lesson that I learned from my dad.  It is the lesson that countless other kids learned.  This is how kids learn to play with toy swords and not get into duels with kitchen knives.  When you don’t differentiate between toy and real, the kid will play with the real like a toy.  There is actual evolutionary science here, the separation of rough and tumble play and real fighting.  The people that argue rough and tumble play teaches kids to be violent don’t know the actual science, and are emotionally stunting children.

This mom has emotionally stunted her child by filling his head with irrational ignorance.