Tis' the season, to destroy your children's favorite toys!

The most rage inducing "feel good" story of this century?

There, they lined up to toss their toy guns, from dainty purple water guns to camouflage-painted pistols, inside the Bash-O-Matic, a large black, foam creature with churning metal teeth and the shape of a cockroach spliced with a frog.

Prodded by Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, who wore a fuzzy Santa hat, the children stared curiously as the Bash-O-Matic mashed up their guns and digested them into a plastic bin near its tail.

...

In exchange for their toy guns, all the children received wrapped presents that were indisputably not violent — dolls, stuffed animals, and board games like checkers.

Some children were not thrilled with the trade.

Malik Hall, a round-eyed second-grader, looked apprehensive as he stood in line with his favorite toy, a thick, blue gun with plastic sword underneath the muzzle. The 8-year-old was furious when his mother, Amanda, told him he would have to give it up. Yesterday morning, he tried to hide it under his pillow, she said.

“I’m worried,’’ she said. “He might cry.’’

But when it was his turn, Malik strode dry-eyed and with quiet dignity to the Bash-O-Matic and fed it the gun. When his mother approached, he said nothing.

“You don’t want to talk to me?’’ Hall asked. He looked at her stonily and left to retrieve his gift.

Hall said she had no regrets. The 26-year-old mother of six said she has been trying to wean her only son off toy guns for years.

...

Yesterday, she had six other of his guns to feed the Bash-O-Matic, but she admitted she had let Malik keep one, a small pistol that shoots rubber targets.

“I mean, he is a boy,’’ she said.

Many of the children at yesterday’s gun bash were not making anything like Malik’s sacrifice.

Some parents confessed that they bought guns just a couple of days before the event so their children could get a gift or watch the Bash-O-Matic do its work.

“He likes the feeling of breaking things without getting in trouble,’’ said Dominic’s mother, April Johnson, who bought his gun just a couple of days ago.

Grinch approves.

I guess the world is now a safer/better place?

He looked at her stonily and left to retrieve his gift.

That probably had a reverse effect on him. It's only going to increase the chances he'll retrieve a gun in the future.

Hey, she left him one of the six she had bought him in the past. He should be happy! That's still enough for him in a few years when he's an angst filled teen and starts playing Grand Theft Auto to take her and all five of his sisters out right? Toy guns = real guns firing after all. What's next? You'll let kids point fingers?

I mean, how can you stop your kids without some government run terror tactic? He's eight, AND A BOY, and so she had him at 18, and she has five other kids. And these guns just make him act up in school. Which he'll do anyway BECAUSE HE'S A BOY. But these toy guns I keep buying him make him act up in school and it's not my fault we need to get rid of them!

She should have learned a lesson from those other parents and bought a toy gun just to destroy it to emphasize that...well...

You suck up to The Man and you get gifts?