The campaign to demonize guns has been successful in conditioning a lot of people to have an almost superstitious terror at the sight of anything remotely resembling a gun.

Connecticut, having been the site of a horrible murder spree can perhaps be excused for a certain amount of overreacting this report out of New Haven is what can only be described as utter stupidity. At the Benjamin Jepson Magnet School, police were called because a child made a gun out of LEGO blocks and pointed it at other students.

School officials said a child built a toy gun out of Lego at the Jepsen Magnet School in New Haven Thursday.

School administrators called police to the school after the child made the gun and started pointing it at the other kids.

Police!?

I’m willing to accept that they wanted to stop a kid from playing guns—something every boy has done since the invention of guns—on school property.  But calling the cops on a child for unauthorized LEGO activity? That is just insane. No one was in any danger and if the behavior was inappropriate the teachers should have been able to handle the LEGO emergency. If not then they have no business being teachers.

Then there’s the matter of them completely wasting police resources when there may have been people in actual danger and in need of help somewhere but the cops were tied up talking these ninnies down from their tree.

Then there’s a story out of Ohio where someone called 911 because a music teacher was sitting outside playing his bassoon.

Although the temperature was in the mid-50s, after years spent in claustrophobic practice rooms while working toward his degree from the exclusive New England Conservatory in Boston, Barga pulled the custom-made Fox 610 red maple bassoon out of its case, sat on the trunk of his car in the refreshing air and began playing scales.

“There was a nice orange sky in the background,” he recalled. “It was one of the first nice days.”

About seven minutes later, Springfield police received a 911 call reporting that a white male in a jacket and jeans was sitting on the back of his car in the church lot with what looked not like an oboe, the instrument Barga says it’s most often confused with, but a long rifle. Listed under “additional information” on the dispatch form is what, in retrospect, must be considered a grace note: “Unknown of it was for sure.”

I’m no gun expert by I’ll go out on a limb and say most long rifles don’t sound like this.

The police chief said that people are “filtering things through their experience.” Sadly that experience for many now includes incessant news coverage and political grandstanding intended to make people afraid of their own shadows.