Hopefully kids will take up the more reasonable antipathy -- opposition to hysterical self-appointed nannies and out-of-control control freaks.
If you made all the guns disappear off the Earth, right now, this instant, and make all the violent video games, and toys, and comics, and movies, and albums vanish along with them, kids will still connect to the idea of destroying prey from a distance with the simple act of using the remote control. The gun would be re-invented from scratch in short order. Push-button self defense as an idea goes down to our fucking bones.
Indeed, before the gun it was the arrow, and before that the spear. Why get close to kill when you can do it at a distance?
Kind of reaching for a "school" connection. He wasn't at the bus-stop, but near it, and kids on said bus might have caught a glimpse of the toy gun and turned to stone so.....kick this loose cannon out of school! Then ten years later after being labeled a delinquent and finally dropping out of school for good, he turns to crime and shoots somebody with a real gun. Similar to my town a few months back. A guy in his late teens was shooting a BB gun at a styrofoam cup wedged into a huge tree, with more trees behuind that one. Basically a very safe situation. But his yard was adjacent to school property, so he got arrested and fined because the BB gun was considered a weapon - fired inside city limits and too close to a school. Ironically, if he were firing a CROSSBOW pointed at the school he would have been in the clear and within his rights. Hmmmm........stand 50 feet in front of me with a BB gun then 50 feet in front of me with a crossbow and tell me which feels safer.
Yeah, seems like an extreme reaction. You might not realize this, but from a legal standpoint, once a kid is at the bus stop (even if it's in front of his house), the school is responsible for his safety and behavior. Not saying the punishment was proper, but they have to treat the incident no differently than had it happened in the school yard or hallways. If things had gone down a bit differently, and the boys' play had caused an injury, the parents could (and probably would) have sued the school for his behavior on their own property. All this is to say that the problem is not so much about fear of toy guns, but about fucked up legal codes in a society that demands zero tolerance and sues at the drop of a hat.
Fuckin weenies. OMG! Look! There's some children playing with a toy I disapprove of! Let's punish them by permanently fucking up their school records, putting a gun charge in their history, and showing them that authority figures are fucked up! Fuck you, society.
Last summer I was shooting my full auto airsoft off the back porch. I usually make sure the neighbors aren't out so I don't annoy them. This time, as I swung to the right to bounce a few rounds off a suddenly-appearing woodchuck, I noticed the neighbor lady two houses up on her back deck. She clearly reacted to the gun and ran into her house. I dropped everything (especially the gun), ran over and rang her bell, and apologized for scaring her, and explained it was just an airsoft pellet gun and can't hurt anyone. She agreed that I should be able to do that in my own yard, though she didn't look exactly pleased about it. Now I just doubly make sure it's all clear. I wanna be a polite neighbor, and I wanna stay out of jail. So it pays to be considerate and communicate.