It is astonishing to me that so many people visit my site and respond with a knee jerk reaction when presented with an opinion they disagree with. Because I dislike pinatas, and feel that Mexico’s culture fosters violence, people choose to ignore my warning and accuse me of bigotry.

If I say America is a violent society, and it is, who am I stereotyping? White people in Texas who pack guns? Blacks in New Orleans who lost their homes? Or suburban white kids who shoot up their schools? Saying America is a violent society may be generalizing, but it isn’t racism.

Mexico is a nation of many races – indigenous populations, mixed race populations that combined the indigenous DNA with the European conqueror’s DNA, even nearly pure blooded European stock. Who am I being racist towards when saying that Mexican society, their culture, is violent? No one. I am not assigning violence to any DNA profile, I am assigning it to an environment that promotes violence through bloody bull fights and pinata bashing. There is a huge difference. The police in Mexico carry machine guns! Why would the police need machine guns if Mexico weren’t a violent society?

Unfortunately, my comments about Mexican culture seem to have taken the spotlight off of why I created this site – to educate people like you about the dangerous influence pinatas can have on our impressionable youth – so I wanted to take a moment to reinforce that I have nothing against Mexicans, my uncle is married to one and I have half Mexican cousins. I just don’t like their violent sports and festivities like pinata bashing.

Someone posted a comment on my site that he bets I think guns kill people.

Is anyone so naive as to think they don’t? Every statistic has shown that when access to guns, hand guns in particular, is constrained or eliminated, violent crime, and deaths by violence, go down. It is incontrovertible, despite what the NRA says.

So yes, I think guns kill people.

And giving kids a pinata is like giving them a loaded gun and hoping nobody gets hurt.

It is bad enough that video games routinely intice our youth to violence. I read a new grand theft auto game was coming out soon and I honestly fear for the safety of the parents who’s children play that game. I was trying to find something not so violence ridden for my daughter and came across a pinata game.

The clerk told me it was a sandbox game like GTA. Why am I not surprised? I suppose you urinate on prostitute pinatas when you’re not bashing their heads in for candy. I sincerely hope whoever the next president is takes a good looong look at regulating the sale of violent video games like grand theft auto and viva pinata to our children.

A reader just sent me a link to what I can only describe as the perfect example of pinatas inciting violence.

This particular pinata is of Osama bin Laden, and the website even extohls consumers to “kick his ass off.”

It really isn’t much of a leap to go from beating on this rather generic arab looking pinata to beating actual arabs. Even if Osama is a terrorist, pinatas that can incite actual hate crimes against law abiding arabs in our country legally should not be available for sale.

Would we tolerate this pinata if it were a black man? Or a jew? No.

A reader just sent in this somewhat interesting discussion of pinatas by a group of Berkeley parents. There are some good alternative suggestions in there…