Toy guns and the real thing

• Over the past three decades, there has been a hysterical opposition to allowing children to play with toy guns.
  
  I’m not just talking about realistic-looking toy guns, which have on occasion resulted in a police officer shooting some kid; that, sad to say, does pose a real and proven danger.
  
  But many parents – at least in urban areas, and also in what are known as Blue States, - are more than just reluctant to let their children play the types of games my friends and I played on a daily basis when we were growing up: war, Cowboys and Indians, Cops and Robbers, etc., all games that required either toy guns, or reasonable facsimiles thereof (a branch, a two by four, even just a piece of wood, or a bent pipe): they are aggressively and fanatically dead set against their children even making believe they are playing with an imaginary gun.
  
  A few years back, my youngest brother’s son, when he was four, was in pre-school; one day the teacher handed out Lego sets, and instructed the children to construct something to play with.
  
  My nephew and another boy, after some consideration, were inspired to build a handgun.
  
  Well, the brown stuff hit the revolving blades that day! Paul, my brother, got a call from the school reporting his son’s evil construction. The caller was extremely serious and seemed extremely out of sorts about the entire matter; you would have thought my nephew had been caught putting together a zip gun (for those of you unfamiliar with that device, it is a homemade gun, usually shoddily made and fairly unreliable except at close range, that was very popular in the 1950’s and 60’s with juvenile gangs; quite illegal, of course, and potentially as dangerous to the shooter as to the victim).
  
  My brother couldn’t believe the fuss the school was raising. He of course went to the school, and reiterated, flat out, what he’d said to the caller over the phone: that he saw nothing wrong with his son having made a gun from the Lego pieces he’d been given. He pointed out the obvious, that there was no way in the world that this Lego gun could be made to work like a real gun. He also stated that he was rather proud that his son has used some ingenuity and make something other than a Lego house or a Lego car. Besides, his son was a boy, and boys have traditionally been drawn to toy guns.
  
  The school officials were flabbergasted. Aghast. Incredulous. In their eyes, my nephew – who, remember, was only four years old at the time – had committed some great transgression against Society. My brother, who is imbued with a great deal of Common Sense, naturally saw them as being quite idiotic about the entire affair. When he called me to tell me about this incident, I heartily agreed with him. In fact, I was even more incensed than he was, what with my being a strong proponent of the Second Amendment, and having played with (toy) guns throughout my grammar school years, and thus seeing absolutely nothing wrong with such play.
  
  Hell, my oldest friend, Little Joe, once talked his parents into buying him a tripod-mounted 50 caliber machine gun that the Great Western, a local supermarket, had on display atop one of their food cases. It was the Mother of all Toy Guns, and my friends and I, whenever we were sent to the market by our parents, would gaze longingly at that magnificent replica of the weapon that Sgt. Rock’s strongman machine-gunner, Bulldozer, used to carry around and use in battle in DC’s Our Army At War.
  
  It cost Joe’s dad all of $25.00 (it was a happier time, when M&M®s and Life Savers® and Tootsie Roll®s cost a mere nickel, the 64-count Crayola® box cost a whopping 65 cents, and no Sales Tax existed). This machine gun came with an honest-to-goodness ammo belt, loaded with about 50, I think, white plastic .50 cal. Bullets! The downside was that once the ammo belt was emptied, we had to call Time Out and the entire crew would run around the driveway at Bobby Savornik’s house picking up the bullets so they could be loaded onto the belt again…Joe only used it in Bobby’s driveway because we feared losing some of the bullets if we used them on the sidewalk…
  
  My own sons and their friends used to play in our neighborhood with toy guns; whereas my friends and I were busy fighting Nazis and Japs (on rare occasions, we also played Civil War scenarios), my boys and their friends apparently battled more modern, or I should say, futuristic, wars, thanks to the Star Wars® mindset that had taken root by the early 80’s.. But they also sometimes played G.I. Joe® against some unnamed generic enemies of America (the smaller, jointed G.I. Joe Action Figures® were also pretty popular in those days).
  
  But I’m afraid I digress from my point, which is that playing with guns (not real ones, of course) is NOT a Bad Thing. I reiterate: boys playing with toy guns is NOT a Bad Thing.
  
  It’s a healthy outlet, as far as I’m concerned. Proof of that lies in the fact that while my generation grew up with toy guns being sold everywhere, and being a common Christmas or Birthday gift for a young boy, even BB and pellet guns (for non-urban kids, anyway), it is not MY generation that developed Drive-By shootings as a replacement for Rumbles. Drive-By shootings were an innovation of the generation that was, for the most part, NOT allowed to play with guns, NOT allowed to play Soldier, NOT allowed to watch “violent” cartoons such as Tom and Jerry, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, and especially the Popeye cartoons of the 1930’s and 40’s.
  
  (Speaking of which, I have to take a slight detour here: did you ever see those disgustingly lifeless, sterile Popeye cartoons produced in the late 60’s and early 70’s? Popeye and Bluto hardly ever even raised their voices at each other, let alone have those heroic, absurd and deliciously hilarious fight scenes that made us laugh ourselves silly in the days when Popeye cartoons actually had a plot. No wonder the series is no longer around.)
  
  So, the generation that was raised on dull, lifeless, non-violent cartons, and that were forbidden, for the most part, to play with toy guns, grew up to be much more violent than the previous generation (mine), that consistently watched violent (and extremely funny) cartoons and played with toy guns on a daily basis.
  
  John Derbyshire, the British doctor, prison psychiatrist, author, columnist and regular contributor to National Review, once wrote a column about two friends of his when he was growing up in England, brothers whose parents absolutely forbid them to play with guns or anything to do with guns. Derbyshire had a GI Joe, one of the first ones, made in the 60’s, that stood 11 inches tall; his friends’ parents allowed him to bring his GI Joe to their house so he and the brothers could play, but he could not bring over the toy soldier’s guns. Furthermore, his GI Joe could not be a soldier: he had to be a fireman or something.
  
  So, what did that well-intentioned parental Ban result in?
  
  Both brothers eventually grew up to become professional soldiers. Take that, gun-grabbers!
  
  Back in the 80’s, I owned three handguns. I showed them to my sons, let them touch them (unloaded, of course), and taught them the basic tenets of gun safety:
  
  * Never under any circumstances point a gun at anything you’re not willing to shoot;
  * All gun accidents happen with “unloaded” guns;
  A gun is not a toy;
  * Never pick up a gun you might come upon.
  
  My sons were 9 and 6, respectively, when I began to teach them these rules. I told them that they were never to try to find my guns; that if they wanted to see and touch them, all they had to do was ask, and I would bring one out for them to see and touch. I kept my word; after about four or five times, they stopped asking. Their fascination and natural curiosity was satisfied.
  
  Had I forbidden them to ever touch the guns, and never allowed them to see them, they might very well have gone looking for them on their own. That is how many tragedies occur. Not forbidding them from ever handling the unloaded guns whenever they wanted to, so long as they asked and did so under my close supervision, made the fact that there were guns somewhere in the house No Big Deal.
  
  I once told a group of people at a company meeting this little story, and a stuck-up bleached blonde from some moneybags town tried to make me feel like an ass. Being a typical New Jersey liberal, she was totally anti-gun, and was horrified that I had guns and let my sons see them upon demand.
  
  What this silly, overweight, pretentious bitch failed to realize was that I had educated my sons about the dangers of guns, and, by not making the handguns a Forbidden Apple, had actually drastically decreased any danger they may have posed. They were still well hidden, but were never looked for by my sons, who are naturally curious. Satisfying their curiosity and knowing they could see and handle them whenever they asked kept them from searching for them.
  
  Of course, it helped that my sons are both very intelligent, and have more than a modicum of common sense, not only today, but even at those young ages.
  
  (Another quick aside here: too many parents treat their children like mini-morons; they think the children are unable to comprehend too many things. While that may be true for some children, who are perhaps a little on the slow side, I’ve found that most kids, when you take the time to explain the Why of something, and are given an opportunity to think of and digest the information being given them, will understand much more than many grown-ups think they can. Sure, there are some kids who, no matter that they understand the reason not to do something, will do so anyway out of some sense of adventure or daring, or outright juvenile rebellion; but giving a child a legitimate reason not to do something by explaining the dangers or other downside, rather than the perennial “because I said so” line, is a much better way to get them to develop some common sense and understanding of dangers and Faux Pas’ they are not naturally aware of.)
  
  That Education came in handy only a year after I began it: my older son one afternoon burst into the house to tell me that he and his friends had found a gun.
  
  He and some of his friends in the neighborhood had been playing “army” in the wooded lot behind our house, on the grounds of a former school; in the dirt on the bank of a tiny stream that ran through the property, they found a pistol. One of the boys, Michael, who was maybe 6 or 7 at the time, wanted to pick it up. My son, who was 10 at the time, and ingrained with what I’d taught him about the dangers of guns, would not let Mike or the others touch it, and told them they had to report their find to the Police. He herded them all back to our street and ran home to tell me what they’d found.
  
  I immediately called the Clark Police, and they sent a car out; my son went back to the lot with the responding officer to show him the weapon’s location.
  
  Tragedy was surely averted, because little Mike, innocently enough, might have pointed the gun at one of the other kids, or maybe shot himself, had my son not stopped him from picking it up. Now, had I never taught my son what I had, would he have reacted the same way? I don’t know. I wonder if even he knows, to this day.
  
  Probably not, because the boys would have had a chance to grasp a Forbidden Object, a Holy Grail that all or most of them, being boys, would have doubtless wanted to hold, aim – and, quite possibly, fire...
  
  My having educated my son about guns, even at that young age, rather than never broaching the subject out of ignorance and unreasonable fear, probably saved at least one of those boys’ lives that afternoon. Over the past couple of centuries, in a climate less hostile to firearms, generations of children in this country, especially in rural areas, were taught both the dangers of guns, and how to safely handle them. That’s why, in days gone by, grammar school-aged children used to regularly go out hunting or target shooting. It was a routine part of their childhood, and a rifle or handgun was no more than a tool. The child’s knowledge of the dangers and proper use of those tools kept them from harming themselves or others in play, so that a BB gun or .22 cal. rifle were common Christmas or Birthday presents.
  
  
  
  Copyright 2005, Roy Pitta