Toy guns used to be a normal part of childhood, at least for boys. It wasn’t just for boys, of course, but they were the ones usually interested in them.

Back then, toy guns were just part of life. If you took a toy gun to school, though, it got confiscated and held onto by the teacher until the end of the day or, if she were really mean, until the end of the year.

Now, it prompts a lockdown, apparently.

After Karns High School was put on lockdown Friday for a rumor of a weapon on school property, the Knox County Sheriff’s Office said Sunday detectives discovered toy guns during their investigation.

Deputies searched the school Friday in response to rumors that there was potentially a weapon on school property connected to an incident between two students that occurred off-campus on the previous day.

Three toy pistols were reportedly found in a student’s vehicle.

That’s right, they shut down a school because of three toy pistols and stuff that happened off-campus.

Now, don’t get me wrong, if they thought there was a threat, it’s probably best to deal with it and find out later that they weren’t real guns, which is what they did.

However, my question is that if the issue happened off-campus the day before, then why wasn’t it dealt with off-campus before there could be any risk to other students?

It would seem logical to me that if you think these students represented some kind of risk, you’d deal with it before they could hurt anyone else. Either arrest them that night (assuming a crime was committed) or get them as they came on campus the next day rather than lock everything down after they were already in and among their classmates.

Instead, they waited and just locked down the school.

I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s particularly smart.

Then again, they were also just toy guns.

To be fair, though, we don’t know the nature of the supposed threat. Was it a paranoid parent completely flipping their lid because Karen saw Junior and his buddies putting airsoft guns in the trunk so they could play after school or was it kids trying to play at being hard and threatening someone? The report doesn’t say, so we can only speculate.

There may also have been a delay in reporting, either because someone took a little while in recognizing a potential threat or for some other reason, which is why law enforcement didn’t act sooner.

We don’t have the whole picture.

What we do have, though, is a school being locked down because a couple of kids had toy guns in their car. In my day, we had kids with actual shotguns and rifles visible in the back window of their trucks and the only thing we thought was, “I wonder if Kevin got a turkey this morning before school.”

That was literally it.

Times have changed, and not for the better in that regard, that’s for sure.