I’ll be the first to admit that toy guns have always made me uncomfortable. My son who is now 23 was not permitted to have or play toy guns. My daughter at 12 was never interested so the issue never came up.
There is something about a child pointing a gun at another child and pulling the trigger that horrifies me. No matter how fake they are or look. I was also concerned that if toy guns were commonplace they may pick up a real gun more readily either not knowing it is real or because they are comfortable with the concept.
As a matter of note, I have no problem with the kids shooting bad guys in video games. It is the real life game that I wouldn’t allow.
I am wondering if many parents still allow their children to play with toy guns and have them in the home or has that kind of role playing been discouraged due to gun violence fears or other reasons?
Actually from what I understand, our generation had one of the worst cases of gun violence in history when we reached our 20s. Gun violence has been going down since 1993 and I attribute that to people being aware and not allowing weapons to be used as play things. However, that is only my personal opinion as to why the decline occurred. (Well, a contributing reason anyway)
My sister-in-law tried to make the “no toy guns” rule to my nephew who is now 8. After he got in “trouble” for playing with toy guns, (his hand and sticks) she finally gave up and just bought him some nerf toy guns.
Boys love this type of play and if they don’t learn it at home by their parents buying them the toys they will learn on the school yard and then just try to hide it from the parents as my nephew did.
I think it’s silly to try to keep this type of play from them. Too many cartoons, tv shows and movies have guns in them for the kids not to be exposed and if interested to get interested in guns.
I think the best thing to do is educate them about guns early on. Like when you are teaching them to look before crossing the street age type young. Then when they get old enough to put them in a gun safety class. That’s what my parents did.
I don’t remember the course but we were still in elementary school when we took the saftey course.
Here’s one,
My dad hunted when I was growing up and hung his guns on the wall in his office. We knew if we ever looked at the guns funny we would get into a lot of trouble and we knew that they were dangerous and that we could accidentally kill each other. My dad would take us hunting, usually combined with camping outings, with him because he wanted it to be a family thing. So once we got a little older my parents put us through a more thorough gun safety course where we had to take and pass a test. Only then did my dad actually let us shoot a gun at shooting range.
Over the next years he tried to get my brother and I into hunting but neither of us really cared about it so we never did.
So even if your pushing guns onto your kids they may not be interested even though they are really into toy guns like my brother and I were.
For some reason I was never allowed to play with toy guns, but I played Wolfenstein, Doom, and Duke Nukem. I seem to have escaped the horrible devestation they caused in other fragile minds because I have yet to kill anyone.
Maybe my parents were OK with me pretending to kill aliens and Nazis but not the neighborhood kids.
I think the best way to deal with it is to teach gun safety starting at a very young age. I can’t even remember when I first started learning not to touch grandpa’s guns - I just knew that if I did, it was one of the very few things that would get me a spanking. My grandfather started teaching me to shoot when I was 10.
Years ago, I saw a documentary…or maybe a story on some news program about ultra liberal parents forbidding their sons from playing with toy guns or other “violent” toys. They gave the boys dolls…Barbie or some such…on camera. The kids promptly started “sword fighting” with the dolls.
I think it’s just more liberal stupidity. Boys will be boys. If I had kids, I’d give them the same sort of training with real guns I received–had a bb gun around age 4, had a shotgun by age 10, went shooting/hunting with my father before I could even tie my own shoes. I was taught how to safely handle guns, and that I was not allowed to touch a real gun (including the ones that belonged to me) without adult supervision until I was 14 or so. The penalty for breaking that rule was too horrible to even contemplate— my guns would be taken away, and I’d never be allowed to hunt/shoot with my father again. After 15 or so, I routinely had a shotgun in the trunk of my car at school during hunting season, as did many other boys. This was common knowledge, and no one thought anything was amiss. We’d go hunting before or after school. This sort of experience was typical for boys when and where I grew up.
Toy guns were different. I always had them, as long as I can remember. Played with them all the time, as did most other boys of my generation. We damn well knew the difference between the toys and the real ones, and what was allowed with each. To date, so far as I know, none of my childhood companions have shot anyone for real outside of a military/law enforcement/self defense situation.
I believe my mother had the same concerns you do. I was never allowed toy guns, though the occasional squirt gun was reluctantly permitted. As others have said, I just ended up playing with toy guns at friends’ houses, or improvising other objects into guns. I’m 40 now, and haven’t shot anybody yet…
I think video games desensitized me to guns in an interesting way. Shooting stuff in video games results in lots of graphic and sound rewards. Explosions and alien guts, or whatever. Shooting a gun in real life results in…a hole in a piece of paper. Today I find shooting and guns profoundly boring. (I’m not trying to crap on anybodies hobby. If you like guns and shooting, that’s cool, they’re just not my thing at all).
Anyway, to a large degree, boys will be boys, and will play with guns one way or another. Is this a good thing? Does it need lecturing and caution? I don’t really know. In a way I think toy guns are safer than toy swords, as toy guns don’t result in any physical damage (until somebody runs out of ammo, and the fight goes to the ground). Swords and their proxies often involve real, violent physical contact. Is encouraging and facilitating non-violent play in boys a good thing, certainly. Is freaking out about violent play in boys bad, probably. I’m neither a child psychologist nor a parent, though I was a 10 year old boy once.
As for decreases in gun violence and shooting deaths, that is a tremendously complex issue. The guys in Freakonomics often discuss the many factors going into the decrease in crime rate. Anybody who tells you one thing is responsible is mistaken, whether that thing is more prisons, social programs, or relaxing of gun laws.
I killed many a friend with toy guns back in the day. Hell, we used toy hand grenades, toy bazookas and toy rocket launchers. In my teen years I owned a couple of guns, mainly because everyone else had them. I’ve never kill anyone for real and never had any urge to do so.
Boys will make a gun out of anything. If you ban toy guns then they have to wait until they are in their 20s to get one and by then it will be especially interesting.
Also, consider the message you send when you ban the things the boys like and allow the things the girls like.
Why do you attribute the sharp rise and fall of gun homicide to toy acceptance? That seems unsupported by fact. Here’s a chart of gun violence by year. Here’s a table of gang homicides in LA county. The National Institute of Justice says this: In 1976, the percentage of homicides caused by firearms during arguments was about the same as from gang involvement (about 70 percent), but by 1993, nearly all gang-related homicides involved guns (97 percent), whereas the percentage of gun homicides related to arguments remained relatively constant.
Sounds to me like if you don’t want your kid shooting someone, you don’t have to keep them from playing with guns as a kid; you have to keep them out of street gangs.
I’m of the opinion that kids will naturally play violent games, whether you ‘allow’ it or not. If you don’t let them have toy guns, they’ll make guns out of fingers or toast or sticks or playsilks. They’ve always played weapon games, since long before the invention of firearms, and they always will. Everyone has natural violent feelings and the major way to deal with them is through play. And fairy tales, the real ones.
I have two girls and they had swords, staffs, nunchucks, and lightsabers, but I don’t remember buying them guns. They made bows and arrows. My older daughter asked for, and got, a BB gun for her 10th birthday. We’ve all had fun shooting at soda cans with it.
I’m not a big fan of the goofy giant terminator play weapons that some of my friends’ sons have–I prefer less over-steroided toys–but I’m certainly not against the principle.
Female, grew up in the 60s and 70s. I played cowboys and indians or cops and robbers with cap guns growing up. I have no guns now, although I’ve shot from time to time using friends’ weapons at a range. My brother is pretty much the same. Children generally have a better grasp on the difference between reality and pretend than most people realize.
This is kind of mean, I admit, but one way I’ve dealt with toy guns is to inject some seriousness into the games. When my son points a toy gun at me and says “are you a bad guy”, I’ll say “yes” and get shot – only then I say “oh I was just kidding I was actually a good guy arghh…”. The hint of terror in his face (initially anyway – he’s pretty much over this joke) made me feel a little better about the game.
To be honest though, I can’t say it abated his interest in guns at all. Probably just turned him into a cold-blooded killer. Oh well.
Out of the whole gang of us in the neigborhood, only one of us ended up joining the military and becoming a Marine. (granted, he’s a pilot and a squadron commander, but still…)
Yep, you guessed it, the kid whose parents wouldn’t let him have any “war toys”.
I had a toy arsenal as a child, along with fairly accurate uniforms and a bunch of belts, etc… that I got at an army surplus store. I learned to shoot a bb gun at about 6, and could have graduated to real guns as a teenager, but never really got into it.
My family allowed toy guns, cap guns, nerf guns that we shot at each other all day long. Since then the only real gun I have shot is a rifle (and one shotgun) on a range at Boy Scout Camp over 15 years ago, that’s it. Friends invite me to go hunting all the time, my dad invites me to go sport shooting all the time, but I’ve never done it. If I was a ‘gun guy’ I don’t think it would have mattered if I had toy guns growing up or not. I really, truly don’t think a toy gun translates to a real gun any more then letting your kid play in one of those PlaySkool Cars is going to make them any more likely sneak out with the real car when they’re 12.
Also, as an anecdote. I know of two families that banned guns from their households. Both of them commented on their kids shooting each other with guns they made out of toast.
I had lots of toy guns when I was a kid. When I turned 5, I got a BB gun. When I turned 7, I was given a real shotgun and a real .22 rifle. When I was 8, I bought myself a pellet gun. All during this time I also played with toy guns with my friends. I have never shot a real person with a real gun. Nor do I have the desire to. I currently own all of the aforementioned real guns (the toy ones were discarded by my mom after I grew out of them) I had as a kid, along with several other shotguns, rifles, and handguns. While I have no desire to shoot a real person, I would if I needed to.
Playing with toy guns does not translate into real gun violence. Children should be tought about gun safety and respect for weapons.
This. Well, my parents actually weren’t that keen on me killing aliens (I was never allowed to play “Doom”) but they relaxed on Wolfenstein once I pointed out that I was only pretending to kill Nazis - which would, I argued, be morally unobjectionable even if I were doing it for real.
Female. I played with toy guns growing up in the '80s. My 3 year old son and 5 and 17 year old stepsons play with them constantly now, though I discourage them from “killing” each other and try to encourage them to only kill imaginary bad guys. They all know that I carry a gun in my purse and at work. There are several guns in my house. It would be counter-productive to my lifestyle and to the safety of my children to make guns a taboo thing to them.
When my son got his first water gun, he was so excited to have a gun of his very own. It was adorable. I was one very proud Mommy.
I’m very careful to teach them the difference between Mommy’s gun and toy guns.
