Will playing with toy guns turn dangerous?

[The Straight Story]

Will playing with toy guns turn dangerous?

Special to The Seattle Times

Q: My sweet 5-year-old son likes to play guns. While we do not have any toy or real guns in our house, he makes them out of newspaper or uses a plastic golf club as his gun. Our rules are: You cannot point the "gun" at a person or animal, and you cannot say anything unkind while using your weapon.

I was mortified the other day when my excited son said to his play date's mother, "I am going to shoot you."

Please offer your thoughts and advice on this topic.

A: We live in a gun culture. Therefore, it's not surprising that children — boys and girls — pretend to shoot people in play.

Do you fear that your child will grow up to be a gun-toting person? Do you fear that, unlike you, he'll own guns some day?

This is unlikely. Since you don't endorse gun use or gun ownership, you'll probably instill in your son your abhorrence of real guns.

It's important to know that children don't understand the permanence of death until they're about age 10. So playing with guns isn't really about pretending to kill people, it's more about magically and imaginatively zapping them. That's probably what your son was doing when he said he was going to shoot a friend's mother. He just wanted to zap her so that his friend didn't have to go home and end the play date.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/parenting/2004435075_faull24.html

I played with toy guns, and I don't own a gun now (Though I did during my time as a deputy and when I was in Security). It was just a normal part of being a kid to me - using something from a distance to harm those trying to do bad things (whether it was an arrow, gun, heat ray vision, etc).

I don't get the worry over guns. I DO get the concern over certain people having them, because it is the owner of the gun we fear more than the gun (at least to me).

Sadly, in our world, we fear each other so much that we want to restrict people more and more because of the POTENTIAL of them to do harm. It is no wonder our freedoms are slipping, we buy more and more into the government mantra that we citizens are potential 'terrorists' while they are the ones killing others and keeping us from having a central health care system.

I have never killed anyone. But our government by their omission and by their actions have killed many.

I trust ME more with a gun than I do them.

[judy]

1. I think you have a point there...

To paraphrase the NRA, it is not guns that kill people. What kills people, is to propagate the philosophies that there are people who are better than others, that revenge is the only manly way to act, and that anyone who does something bad "deserves to die".

These philosophies are repeated every day million of times in the media, from the government, in schools, etc.
In reality, no one "deserves to die". Everyone dies, whether they deserve it or not :)
The death penalty encourages the idea that it's OK to kill when someone does you wrong, and public figures such as politicians think that it's great to be for the death penalty.

Bla bla bla...That's what kills. Not guns.
That said, you have to admit Straight Story, that very few people have need of semi automatic sub machine guns such as uzis, and it would be OK if they were only reserved for the military.

[The Straight Story]

2. I agree

There IS a limit. General guns for home defense and hunting I am OK with.

We don't need tanks, nukes, machine guns for that :)

I am all for the right for people being able to defend themselves and hunt.

Restrictions on types of weapons is different than keeping people from all weapons.

[Edweird]

3. Of course. Just look at how violent and ruthless baby boomers are.

They grew up watching westerns and World War 2 movies and tv shows and played cowboys and indians and soldier with toy guns. Look how bad THAT turned out. Now that we are so much "smarter" and afraid of essentially EVERYTHING, we are so much safer. Right? All one needs to do is compare the gun crime ridden 60's and 70's when those baby boomers came of age after playing with toy guns versus the peaceful era we entered once we realized that the gun itself was the problem and not the criminal behind it.