Spoon Control

6 A.M., Monday, March 13, 2004. Samuel Dazzeri, a fifteen year old Goth kid, walked in the automatic doors of his school’s gym. Inside a dozen staff were helping serve the hundred children who arrived early for the school’s free breakfast. Dazzeri ignored the teachers who called to him to take a seat and put his backpack on the floor. Still standing in the doorway, he pulled out a medical grade Rapid Fire Spoon, also known as a RFS, and pushed a full Tupperware container of cereal into the loading slot. As his fellow students ran screaming and heroic teachers dove towards him, he brought the feeding mechanism up to his shoulder and fired. In a matter of seconds, it was over. Almost the entire staff was lying on the floor soaked in milk and cheerios, two dozen kids had been splashed and much of the schools paper supply had been ruined. Releasing the rest of the Tupperware container’s cargo into his own face, Samuel Dazzeri soaked himself before the police arrived. To this day it is remembered as a tragedy and a reminder of the power of RFS’s. When she invented it in 1987, physician Harriet Bulgram had no idea she was making such a dangerous tool. While medical professionals can use the RFS effectively to feed multiple patients, civilians who own them because of a need to feel empowered endanger our clothes every day. Even with the background checks and waiting period, unstable members of RFS owners can still get ahold of them. The only logical solution is to ban the ownership of RFS’s for anyone not of the medical profession. This essay will examine this and prove it, provide reasons for doing so, and show how such a ban could be implemented.

Samuel was an psychopath whose mother owned an RFS out of a fear that she would one day have to defend herself or feed a large number of people quickly. She left it in her unlocked closet and on occasions took it out in Samuel’s presence and cleaned it. This exposed young Samuel to a feeling of normalcy and familiarity with RFS’s that later induced him to choose one as his weapon of choice. This completely legal ownership of an RFS caused dozens of shirts, pants to get ruined that day. Once the investigation was over and Samuel had been sent to prison, the RFS was returned to his mother without a consequence for her actions. Last week, that very RFS was found to be responsible for a triple soaking on the Texas-Mexico border. Samuel’s mom, it seems, sold it soon after she got it back to a farmer who had a substance abuse problem. Again, because the farmer had no convictions, the sale was completely legal. Because of these and dozens of other loopholes, the only way to stop these mass soakings is to completely ban the RFS from civilian use. Civilians have no need for RFS’s and are only posing a danger to others and to themselves by owning them.

But there must be an acceptable situation for a civilian to own an RFS. No, there is not! First, civilian ownership cheapens the sense of power RFS’s contain. When a doctor uses one, it is with respect and care, but, if every civilian used them once a week at a range, the mystery would be gone and our respect for the power of the machines would go with it. Second, if civilian ownership continues on the trend it has followed since the invention of the RFS, mass soakings will continue to pop up more frequently. Third, civilian RFS ownership makes it easier for outlaws and other such people to get RFS’s. Yes, some RFS supporters like to point out the outlaws get their RFS’s from mainly illegal sources, but the truth is that almost all RFS’s start out being legally owned and are then stolen or sold until they reach the wrong hands. For these reasons, a ban on RFS’s is necessary.

However, anyone can pass a bill that makes it illegal to own an RFS without a medical permit, enforcing it is another matter. In order to do so, a new governmental agency along the lines of the FBI needs to be set up to police the sale of spoons and cereal, which, while not addressed in this brief look at this important issue, merits a separate piece of legislation to restrict the types and amounts of cereal sold to nonmedical personal. For the purposes of this essay, let’s call the agency the Bureau of Milk, Cereal, and Spoon Enforcement, or BMCSE for short. After setting up the parameters for BMCSE to operate within, the legislation restricting ownership of RFS’s would have to set out an amount of time for civilians to surrender their now illegal spoons to local police forces. This would allow for a quiet, pleasant shift in ownership without trials or lawsuits. After the set time, any civilian RFS owner caught without a medical permit would be sentenced to thirty years in federal prison without parole. BMCSE’s duties would be to enforce this legislation and any other such laws pertaining to the restriction of milk, cereal, and spoons.

This ban, if implemented and enforced by BMCSE, would protect our children and their clothes from dangerous people with access to RFS’s. It would help prevent criminals from using them to splash us in our daily lives. Many people like to say that if they don’t have an RFS they may be unable to protect themselves and their families and may be unable to feed large numbers of people in an emergency. The truth is that if all RFS’s were illegal to own, no one would need to protect themselves from them because they would not be in civilian hands. So, in the interest of your children and in the interests of your own clothes, call your senator and ask him to restrict the ownership of RFS’s to professionals only.

THE END

© 2015 Joshua Berkau

E-mail: Joshua Berkau

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