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Pretend Violence Doesn't Have To Be RealFeb 23 '01 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line Common sense beats curiosity and ignorance every time. It surprised me that he looked up and said “I didn’t know you were anti-gun.” My stepson’s best friend had just come over to see if he could play but since he was at his mother’s I had to send him away. Just before he left I told him to hold on because we had a toy of his here. It was a very real looking toy machine gun, shiny black and just about the exact size. From a distance it would be easy to mistake for a real gun. Not exactly the type of firearm (if it were real) we believe in for ourselves but we are a strict Pro-2nd Amendment family. Before I gave the toy back to him I stuck it in a large brown grocery bag. I did that because as a child there was an incident somewhere near to where I lived where a teenager had been shot and killed by police who thought the gun he was carrying and pointing at them was real, and face it I’m paranoid about stuff like that. As I handed the bag to him I told him that I did not want him to bring that toy back to our house, which was when he made the comment. I didn’t know how to address it in terms that a seven year old would understand. I did not want that particular toy in the house because of its realism. I had confiscated it from my stepson the moment I saw it. We have nothing against toy weapons and my younger boys started making toy guns long before they had any actual toy weapons. We do however like to draw the distinction between “real” and “toy” and that is one place where we have our limits. The children can have toys weapons but they must look like toys, they must be unmistakable as an item of pretend. Since we intend for them to someday learn how to use and handle real firearms we don’t want to be sending any mixed signals out now. There is something about letting them play with a real looking toy, when they don’t yet know enough to tell the difference, that sends up safety issue flags. Part of this comes form my own childhood. My father was a hunter and all around gun collector and as a result firearms were a fact of life around my house. We had a whole set of rules concerning both toy and real weapons that centered on teaching how to safely and respectfully handle ourselves around (real) firearms. It was a set of rules that all my dad’s friends had in some similarity for their households and all of us children in these homes grew up safe and without incident. Many of us children learned to shoot early and had our own personal firearms, usually hunting rifles, by the age of twelve or so. There was always something about those of us who “knew guns” that set us apart from the friends we had that didn’t. It was a combination of fear, awe and curiosity in those “unaware” friends that made them dangerous to be around with our firearms. As an adult I have experienced much the same thing. Adults who had never been around any firearms, either real or pretend, as children tend to be unsafe when they finally got one in their hands. I don’t know how or why adults with no previous interest or experience in firearms decide to get one all of a sudden and without cause. It isn’t so much that they decide to get one that bothers me as the idea that most of them seem to think it is just another item to have like a TV or a new car. I twice in my life have had real rifles, including my own loaded one, pointed at me by people who simply didn’t know better. Neither person had any intention of hurting me they were simply too ignorant to realize that what they had their hands needed to be treated with caution and respect. We live firmly by the rule that “Gun’s don’t kill people, People kill people.” Gun ownership, and I suppose any other weapon as well, is a responsibility that needs to be taken with the utmost of seriousness especially if there are children around. It isn’t just about locked cabinets or unloaded firearms. It is about teaching the proper handling and ingraining the lessons so that they are never forgotten. Some of these lessons are best and most safely taught by starting with toys and how they are treated and handled. As far as the violent play of children, we don’t fear it. I believe there is something positive that a child learns as he plays Cops and Robbers or some other form of Good Guys/Bad Guys. Children have always played at games like these and maybe it is the fact that they don’t play enough of them anymore that makes our youth of today so much more violent in reality instead of in pretend (among other factors). Rather than making children more violent I think it helps them to understand the difference between what is right and wrong, who is good and bad and which side they should be on. I question the foundation of the kid who always insists on being the bad guy getting away from the good guys. I always know something good is happening when a child wants to fight crime or conquer evil. I also believe that acting things out through play can be that which stops children from acting out for real sometimes.  |
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