Is it possible that, after 20 years of TNT’s 24 hours of A Christmas Story, a musical, and a live televised performance that we’ve reached Peak Ralphie? According to startling numbers on eye injuries from a new study in the journal Pediatrics, we have to either hope so or we’ll raise an entire generation of cyclopi by 2020.
From 1990 to 2012, eye injuries to children from nonpowder guns — including official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifles (with a compass in the stock) — increased 168 percent. TNT’s all-day marathons started in 1997. And between just 2010 and 2012 alone, they increased by 500 percent; the musical premiered in 2009.
It’s clear that the rise of bad kids with airguns — and you know which ones are bad because of their eye patches and/or monocles — has nothing to do with the airguns themselves. This is about mental illness. If watching the same movie about a kid putting his parents through the wringer over a toy during the damn Depression isn’t insane, then what is?