My Three Sons, assault rifles

How could anyone even think of spanking Ernie!

Watched another episode of My Three Sons. It seemed so strange---Ernie and his friends were running around playing with toy guns. I loved toy guns when I was a kid, but children pretending to murder each other is so disturbing at my present stage of life.

Ernie and this one kid both had Lugers. The episode was made in 1968 and the other kid stalking them had an M-16, the military version of the AR-15. It seemed like a coincidence, this being shown on the day that kids across the country were walking out of school demanding a ban on these weapons. The episode originally aired on 30 March 1968, just fourteen days after the Mi Lai massacre in Vietnam.

Ernie and the other kid take cover inside a garage or storage shed and find a couple of worn out tires. They sell the tires to get money to buy AR-15's like the other kid has. Uncle Charlie somehow notices the tires are gone and calls the police.

Ernie fears his uncle's wrath. He's in big trouble. His friend tells him that his mother protects him when his father wants to punish him. Having no mother, Ernie goes to his sister-in-law for help. He admits he took the tires. Fred MacMurray and Uncle Charlie agree the boy needs a spanking even though he's fourteen.

Instead of spanking him, Fred MacMurray takes Ernie to the police station and forces him to confess.

This seems like a terrible lesson. If he were my kid, I'd teach him not to answer questions without an attorney present. If you don't want him to become a juvenile delinquent, teach him that being charged with a crime is something to avoid like the plague. Don't make him confess to a crime when he doesn't have to just to make some point that he already figured out.

I have myself been the owner of old car tires. If they disappeared, I would wonder who would bother taking them, but I wouldn't care, and I'm not a wealthy engineer like the character Fred MacMurray was playing. What did Uncle Charlie care? Could he even drive a car? Why was it his business? If I had a kid who sold my tires, I would be surprised anyone would buy them and I would just tell him to ask before selling my junk. That boy deserved a medal for selling those tires!