Make my day, Hello Kitty.

As if there isn't enough out there driving me nuts, I happened to be doing some mid-day staring at the TV while doing incredibly tedious stretching exercises at PT (for last October's fractured arm), when along comes a story about a place in Wisconsin that sells brightly painted guns. Including one really scary one in bright pink decorated with a Hello Kitty cartoon on its stock.

Oh, and if you look carefully, there's a matching pink bayonet.

And while I'm in a questioning mode, have hunting weapons always come with bayonets? What are they used for? Finishing off a wounded animal? Eviscerating and dressing a dead one?

I thought bayonets were for hand to hand combat, but what do I know? My sole knowledge of bayonets comes from All Quiet on the Western Front and Guadalcanal Diary.

But back to Hello Kitty.

Where to begin on this one....

Well, for starters, how about making a real gun look like a toy gun? It seems like only yesterday we were all complaining about toy guns that looked like real guns, which led to a few incidents in which cops killed a kid they thought was aiming at them. Only to find out that they weren't staring down the barrel of a Glock, but the barrel of a flimsy chunk of plastic manufactured in China (which, I'm guessing, is so repressive that people can't carry concealed weapons, toy or otherwise).

Now we have to worry about some little kid picking up the Hello Kitty gun, thinking that it's just a product line extension: notepad, pocketbook, hair clips, ankle socks, music box, gun.

At least we don't have to worry about half the child population. Very few little boys that I know would be caught dead with anything to do with Hello Kitty. Although caught dead might actually be what they end up if some innocent decides to bring this one in for show and tell.

Oh, yes, I know, responsible gun owners keep their weaponry under lock and key. They keep the bullets separate from the guns. They teach their children about firearms.

But what about all those irresponsible gun owners who aren't so careful?

Must be a few of them out there, or we wouldn't keep hearing all those stories about the kid who accidentally shot and killed his brother, would we?

Having a gun around that looks like a harmless toy would seem to me to at least marginally increase the likelihood that something bad will happen.

Then there's the assumption that if-you-paint-it-pink, they-will come. They being women, of course.

Now, I like pink as much as the next guy, errrrr, woman. It is, in fact, one of the colors in my color palette (along with periwinkle and Dutch blue). And I have seen the magic that pink and purple seem to work on little girls, to the degree that I've begun to wonder whether attraction to things pink and purple isn't a secondary sex characteristic.

But equating pink with marketing to woman does kind of strike me as the lazy man's way to sell to us. And I can't imagine any woman who wasn't going to get a gun to begin with deciding to get one now just because it's available in pink.

More than likely, pink gunners will be folks like Connie Cody:

...a 48-year-old administrative assistant in Kenosha, [who]said she only wishes she had seen pink guns for sale after she completed her hunter safety course about 18 months ago.

Since then, she has bought a 9-millimeter pistol, a .357 revolver, a .38 Derringer and a .380 pistol, all in traditional hues.

"If they stock them," Cody vowed after learning about pink guns, "I'm going to buy one."

But wooing young girls who would not otherwise be attracted to gun ownership strikes me as insidious. What is it that we're after here? Making sure that there are equal opportunities for girls to shoot up their colleges and high schools?

I'm sure that, out in Cabela's-land, there are plenty of fathers who hunt who might want their daughters to share this interest. In many ways, I don't get it, but I'm not a vegan, either. But it seems to me that teaching your daughters (or sons) about guns is a serious business. Brown. Black. Grey. These are serious, gunnish colors. Pink? Sorry, not serious enough.

The Hello Kitty gun is the product of Jim's Gun Supply of Baraboo, Wisconsin, whose owner, Jim Astle:

...has been coating guns in pink and other colors for four years. His 12-year-old daughter owns a pink camouflage shotgun.

And what, pray tell, is pink camouflage intended to camouflage?

Barbie's Dream House? A mound of Bazooka Bubble Gum? The parking lot at a Mary Kay Cosmetics convention?

But, wait, there's more!

"Females want to shoot guns, but they want them to look pretty, too," Astle said. "Guys could give a rat's butt what their gun looks like."

I'm not quite sure I buy Astle's belief about "guys" and a rat's butt. Plenty of the guns I saw on Astle's sight were "manly" gun colors - like blues, and greens, and multi-colors.

Great! More guns out there that look like Super Soakers.

This can't end well.

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Quoted material taken from an article by Tom Kertscher in the September 23, 2007, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.