Skip to main content

Teaching your kids to submit to state authority the old-fashioned way: with their toys!


As a kid I saved up all my allowance and chore money for weeks to buy the Johnny Seven One-Man Army, a plastic multi-machine gun that fired plastic bullets, grenades, and rockets, and even came with a detachable cap pistol for use when you'd expended the better part of your ammo in backyard war.

I also played with pots and pans in a kitchen set, but that was something I don't think my parents told the neighbors about.

Today, I do all the cooking, and I won't tell you whether or not I own a firearm to protect my castle. The only reason you could possibly need to know is that you want to break in. And then you'll find out.

Do we become what we play with as children? Maybe at least in part.

Now, thanks to Third Party Watch, I know that we have new toys available to socialize our children to the brave new world of what Simon at From the Barrel of a Gun likes to call Submission Arches:

I hate to get Godwinian here, but OperationCheckpoint.com has just come out with a product that would make Kurt Gruber proud. Here’s the product description:

Scan It® is an educational and creative play toy that helps children become acclimated with airport and public spaces security. The device is both a fun toy and an educational tool. It detects metal objects and simulates an X-ray scan via a functioning conveyor belt that glides articles over its metal detector path. When metallic items are present the unit beeps and lights up.

This unique toy/teaching aid provides ample amounts of healthy fun along with education and awareness of the security measures that people face in real life. A fun and educational booklet is also available upon request along with other online resources at OperationCheckpoint.com.


What’s next: Torture for Tots, Premeditated War for Preteens, Family FISA or Gitmo for Girls?


Not in my house.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I liked it when they used to give kids toy guns and teach them to resist the state. Whatever happened to that Dr. Libertarian?
Anonymous said…
Beats hell out of the "duck and cover under your desk" game we used to play when the Soviets were pointing THIER guns at us.
Scott Freeman said…
Just a heads up: my name is Simon, not Ian! :P
Sorry, Simon--duly corrected. I went to school with a guy named Ian Clark; I guess when you get older the brain farts come more readily....
Scott Freeman said…
Hehe, no problem. Thanks for the link ;)

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...