Good Lord. Are there any real parents left today?

Officers have been called to break up 12 fights, some of them physical, at the child-oriented pizza parlor since January 2007. The biggest melee broke out in April, when an uninvited adult disrupted a child’s birthday party. Seven officers arrived and found as many as 40 people knocking over chairs and yelling in front of the restaurant’s music stage, where a robotic singing chicken and the chain’s namesake mouse perform…

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening here?’” says the 42-year-old stay-at-home mom. “Instead of [the woman] going to the parent or going to the manager, she was calling my friend and daughters all of those names.”

That touched off a fight between more than 10 people, in which participants punched and screamed at each other. One woman removed the red rope that marks the entrance queue and handed it to another woman, who swung the metal clip attached to it at others involved in the incident.

It’d be funny as hell if it weren’t so ridiculous. A bunch of mothers swinging at each other, hitting one other with rope hooks, and cursing as their kids play at a pizza parlor featuring a singing rat. As James Joyner would say, I take it there were no future Nobel Prize winners there.

How has the company responded? Apparently by reconsidering its decision to sell alcohol to stressed-out parents and by posting armed guards inside the restaurants. Because this situation clearly called for the prospect of Little Johnny seeing his mom get shot as she fights with another mother by the Whack-A-Mole.

Bonus: My favorite altercation by far:

Police responded to a brawl involving about 85 people. It began when three women fought after pepper gas was sprayed. People then flooded outside and the fight continued in the back parking lot.

Chuck E. Cheese’s: Where Parents Can Act Like Douchebag Gang-Bangers.