SACRAMENTO-

More than 100 baby rattles, meant to show how important pre-K education is to a group of demonstrators, instead showed how security conscious California’s Capitol has become.

“That’s what they were saying, is that (the rattles are) a weapon. So they had to confiscate all of our rattles,” demonstrator Mary Gutierrez-Khopkar said.

FOX40 asked the CHP why the rattles were rejected, but they told us it was the decision of the State Senate Sargent-At-Arms. So we called his office. As of news time, we’d gotten nary a ring, nor a rattle, back.

The demonstrators themselves weren’t shaken by rattle-gate. They stayed on-message, marching for a law that would allow day-care workers expanded union rights.

“There about 300,000 kids on the waiting list, and part of the problem is that we have so many middle-men involved with administrating childcare in this State. That’s why you can’t get kids enrolled in the program,” Gutierrez-Khopkar said, as a spokeswoman for of the Raising California Coalition.

That’s more than just soothing prattle to the people she presents, rattles or no, even though they were left wondering Wednesday why freedom of speech seems to stop short of the freedom to shake your babies’ bumpies for a cause.

The group also came prepared with chants and songs as they rolled strollers through the Capitol building. That’s a form of protest more familiar in those hallowed, albeit rattle-less, halls of government.