Hands in the air, step away from the Kinder Egg.

My lovely nephew from Palo Alto is going to be very cross about this blog.  He’s still annoyed at the one I wrote at Christmas complaining that there were too many inane commercials on American TV for Pizza followed by inane commercials for fat reduction surgery. Maybe they should just perform liposuction on the pizza and eliminate the middleman? But that’s another conversation altogether.

This one is about Kinder Eggs.  Yes, those delicious German chocolate eggs with the plastic toy inside.

Kinder Surprise Eggs, dear blogees, have been banned in America since 1997.

The reason?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration classifies them as "a confectionery product with a non-nutritive object imbedded in it."  They thus pose a threat to hungry Americans who might mistake the whole thing for a new sort of foodstuff and scarf the egg plus the plastic toy, choke to death, and then sue.

Kinder Surprise Eggs, by the by, are eaten safely throughout Europe, Canada and, for all I know, North Korea and Easter Island.

As my daughter wisely pointed out,“Even if Americans don’t know what a Kinder Egg is, surely they know what plastic is?” But no.  Last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 25,000 Kinder Surprise eggs in 1,700 separate incidents.

Meanwhile, a six year old first grader from Michigan arrived at school with his mother's handgun and shot a fellow first grader to death.

Fatalities from Kinder Eggs have so far gone untallied.

Which just goes to prove the old adage that Guns don't kill people. Um......first graders do.