Machine Gun Camp for Kids

From http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/camp-campaign

Are you shocked yet? Relax, the camp is fake, but the campaign is real.

Last week YouTube popped up a new video for Camp Okutta, a children’s adventure camp just outside of Toronto. It opens with a promising young camp counselor, with a group of scared kids…

The counselor throws a stone onto a patch of grass. Nothing happens. He throws another. A mine explodes. The video is scary, at first you think it could be a real camp.

Fortunately, the camp does not exist.

Canoe.ca says “A Canadian charity is hoping to bring home the plight of war-affected children with a provocative new campaign that asks Canadians to picture their own children shooting AK-47s and walking across minefields.”

At the end, the video directs viewers to the camp’s website, which goes into more detail about what campers will experience. Children who are homesick or afraid are fed amphetamines and a “rudimentary mixture of cocaine and gunpowder.” On good days, they eat plain rice or scraps of food left behind by the camp’s leaders.

The campaign is meant to draw attention to the estimated 250,000 child soldiers worldwide, War Child Canada founder Samantha Nutt said. “What we were trying to do was to really bring the issue home to North Americans in a new and creative way that would ask the question, ‘If this was a Canadian context and these were Canadian kids, what would our reaction be?”’ she said.

“We accept it as part of life in other parts of the world, and yet it is totally abhorrent and totally unacceptable.”

Nutt described the YouTube video and Camp Okutta website as “100 per cent based in reality,” from the images of children detonating mines, to the use of AK-47s, which are considered the weapon of choice for child soldiers because “they’re lightweight and so easy to use,” she said.

After the first night the video had 5,000 viewers and is since up to over 20,000. Shows you just how well viral marketing works these days.

uhohzombies

says...

The scary thing is there are summer camps kind of like this. When I was 7 or 8, I went to the John Birch Society summer camp in North Carolina, which is kind of amusing considering I turned out agnostic and slightly left of center. In case you don't know what JBS is, they're very libertarian/right and religious. There were bible studies and prayer meetings almost every day along with extremely pro-America radically patriotic sessions talking about how the country needs to go back to Revolutionary War ideals. Every other day or so we'd go out to shooting ranges too and fire everything from small caliber handguns to fully automatic assault rifles.

I was 7 years old and I vividly recall firing a .22 Luger handgun, .22 bolt-action rifle, 9mm handgun, .45, and a semi-automatic Kalashnikov. It was a lot like what they show in this video here. They'd even prompt us by saying "Imagine it's Castro out there!" or some other leftist figure from history.

I only went for one summer. I actually quite enjoyed learning how to properly and safely use a firearm and some of the principles of 2nd amendment protections and SAFETY with guns has stuck with me. The rest was far too radical for me, it was like a survivalist militia training camp.

Hanover_Phist says...

This made me very sad. It reminds me of the tremendous documentary " Child's Century of War"

"At the beginning of the last century, nine out of ten people killed in war were soldiers. At the beginning of this century, nine out of ten people killed in war were civilians. Most of them are children."

http://www.bisharifilms.ca/pages/childs_synopsis.html