Beginning in the Seventies, there was a concerted effort by moms in America to make sure that their boys never played with toy guns. No games of “Army” or “Cowboys & Indians”. Many banned little green soldiers and GI Joe action figures.
It seems to me that all they’ve accomplished is generations of boys fascinated by the superheroes in children’s comic books. As a country, we’re no less militant. Gun crime has not dissipated, and TV/movie violence has become increasingly graphic in the past forty years. I sometime harbor thoughts that the military secretly funds video game manufacturers to grow a strain of boys that are accustomed to gruesome casualties and the intricacies of combat techniques.
So…concerned moms who won’t allow their sons to have squirt guns…another example of the nanny state or solid citizens moving us toward world unity?
They have hardly been banned, though. I don’t know about the cowbows vs Indians part, but my own sons had GI Joes…heck, wasn’t there a GI Joe movie not long ago?? And, as you pointed out, today’s kids can play first person shooters that make playing with toy soldiers seem pretty tame.
Wait… how is parents deciding how to raise their own children an example of the “nanny state” in any way, shape, or form? Do you even know what the phrase “nanny state” refers to?
I was born in 1975 and played plenty of “army” with my toy m16 before finishing grade school. I also had a number of cap guns, squirt guns, and bunches of little GI Joe figures. I guess my mom didn’t get the memo.
Yea, I think the OP needs to cite…well really a cite for any of the claims would be a good start. I played with toy soilders and squirt-guns in the 80’s, and the toy stores still seem to be full of both.
My dad was born in the 40’s and had a huge collection of comic books. Kids have been fascinated with superheroes since WWII, if not before.
I doubt moms banning toy-guns has anything to do with it, but gun crime has in fact been dissipating for the past twenty years.
Concerted? Maybe. I kind of doubt this, anyway, without some kind of proof.
Effective? I don’t think so. Kids (both boys and girls) in my hometown were playing with toy guns through the 80s and 90s. Wouldn’t surprise me if they still did.
I guess that’s just one data point, but I don’t recall any kind of nationwide effort along these lines, either.
And was going up until the early 90s. So, apparently America’s moms took 20 years to figure out how to stem gun violence. Or the OP might be wrong. Occam meet Razor and all that.
I question your underlying premise that mothers started discouraging boys from playing with toy guns on a large scale in the 1970s. I was born in 1976 and up until I was eleven or twelve I played with toy guns, GI Joe action figures (not dolls) and my popular forms of passive and active entertainment typically included violence.
You must have grown up in Texas. In my area of the Northeast and later Ohio, there weren’t any toy guns to be found on store shelves. Mothers refused to buy them and stores realized that the space could be used to display items that would actually sell. Toy soldiers were replaced by astronauts, plastic animals and other more sedate material. Nerf and squirt guns are now brightly colored and unrealistic fantasy toys.
In the 40’s your dad may have been fascinated by superheroes but he had grown out of it by the time he joined the army. That or he was considered immature by his peers. In your twenties one may have read sensational men’s magazines but he would be laughed at for reading picture books.
I was born in 1975, and never had any trouble finding guns in toy stores and supermarket toy aisles. And this was in Marin County, California - the ultra-liberal enclave just North of San Francisco.
Mom wouldn’t buy me any toy guns, and so when I was a kid I found bent sticks and played with them. You simply can’t stamp out gun-play among kids.
Incidentally, she later changed that stance to “no toy guns that look like real guns”, so Super Soakers and the like were OK. That seemed to work well for everyone.
I think you’re assuming your own experiences are the same as the experiences of everyone else. They aren’t. I was a kid in the 90s (which I think means I win the thread) and I grew up in the Northeast, and my brother and I had an arsenal of toy weapons. And not just guns, we had some pretty intense plastic sword fights. We also had GI Joes, we played cops and robbers and army and all sorts of violent macho games. Hell, my dad taught me how to shoot a real gun when I was a kid.
Have you ever seen a video game? I was playing Mortal Kombat when I was like 8. When you played cowboys and Indians did you ever upper cut one of the Indians into a pool of acid?
All of my friends had toy weapons too. So you can rest easy pal, little boys still play with toy guns. If it makes you feel better, some people, mostly woman folk, still get all huffy about little boys playing soldier/viking/escaped convicted bank robber with nothing left to lose armed with a sweet toy double barreled shotgun his mom bought him at Disneyworld (I was always the robber in cops and robbers. I liked to give my characters some back story). I know this cute hippie girl who babysat during college. She confided in me “I think there is something wrong with the kid i babysit. The only games he wants to play involve killing things with toy guns or his lightsaber.” I had to explain to her that this was very normal for a kid his age. No little boy wants to play “Gandhi.”
Oh and you probably think comics are for kids because comics used to self censor to make themselves less offensive. There are some really violent comics with adult themes from the 30s and 40s. Comics have rebounded, and become much more adult, lots of sex and violence. Oh and plenty of them don’t really center around a super hero anymore. They have all sorts of different storylines. Reading comics is geek chic. It’s the immature guys who read crap like Maxim. Most men I know wouldn’t be caught dead reading a Maxim, but would readily admit to reading comics books. Oh and plenty of chicks read comics now too. And some of them are even pretty cute. Believe it or not, my girlfriend got me into comics. And I was 21 at the time.
Based on this comment, I would guess that your mom restricted the specific stores that you visited. My son never had a problem finding guns to ask us to buy at our local K-Mart, or the various Wal-Marts, Toys-R-Us, or Kaybees in neighboring towns in NE Ohio. (We bought him some, just not as many as he wanted.)
I have known a few moms who restricted their kids to “non-violent” toys or who “banned” guns, but they were pretty much a minority among the number of moms I have known. Many schools banned “weapon” toys throughout much of that period, and if you had based your OP on that premise, you might have had a shot at a discussion, (as well as making sort of a case for a “nanny state” situation), but the claim that mothers banned guns and stores failed to stock them has no bearing on reality either as history or as an example of a “nanny state.”
(The schools to which my kids went where “weapon” toys were banned provided the dual explanation that some parents objected to such toys while “play fights” had a higher incidence of turning into real fights on the playground, but I never saw a claim by a school that letting kids have toy weapons was going to encourage the kids to grow up predisposed to violence. That argument has been made, but it did not seem to be a factor in the decisions of the schools I have seen.)