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The Mystery of Male Armies, Redux
A young friend came to visit. He is seven years old and, of course, his mother does not permit him to have toy guns. This is what he made, without assistance, using rubber bands and twigs from the yard. Note the magazines (yup, there’s one on the other side) and the sights on the barrel.
As @franksoto put it, in the title to a recent post, “bask in the crazy” indeed.
Published in Guns
Human nature is going to win out whatever we plan…
I have no problem with guns, but I didn’t have them around when my older children were young. With no input or encouragement (no discouragement either) the two oldest, both boys, made guns out of everything from their trio blocks and Legos to pencils and sticks. It’s just in their nature, it seems. My daughter did not, even though she followed them.
Full size photo. Solid work kid.
A rare parenting dispute in our house involved guns. For once, I put my foot down and said that I refused to enforce any sort of ban on our sons. It was not possible to go for a walk anywhere and them not want to make a stick into a gun. I would have constantly been fighting them.
Instead, I informed my sons that guns, real or toy guns, were never to be pointed at a person unless the intent was to shoot that person. So don’t point your gun at me, kid, or I’ll take it away.
If I’m playing cops-and-robbers with you, we need to shoot each other obviously duh, but no ambushing me when I’m not playing and no guns in the house. All weapons in a bin near the door.
How that bin used to bristle when my sons and daughters were younger… Nerf guns, bows and arrows, swords, shields, Gullwhackers, crossbow, waterguns, battle axe, random sticks…
Devil’s Advocate: This is because American society glorifies guns and violence.
Give a little boy a Barbie doll, and he’ll turn it into a weapon.
This is completely true, over and over, from experience.
It’s not that hard. Bend her legs forward at the waist, then turn her horizontal, face down. Hold her by the legs and fire her like a pistol.
Amen!
Oh wait, do you mean, like, that’s a bad thing?
My aunt tells the story of when her son was young and he ran around ”shooting” people with his hand. She told him he could not shoot people, and said ”You’re a deer!” *points fingers at Mom* ”Bang!”.
He’ll go far.
Or just whack your opponent/[brother] over the head with it.
This might be overthinking it for most boys, in my experience…
MiffedWhiteMale has the right idea:
We racked ours brains trying to figure out where our 3yr old had encountered guns, and finally settled on the short scene at the beginning of The Incredibles involving the bank robbers shooting a gun out of their car.
That’s the only thing in any of the movies or books or even his toys at the time that had a gun.
I don’t know what to make of it, but it’s fascinating that a 3yr would build so much from such a tiny moment.
Give any little boy a stick, and he’ll invariably whack something with it, often yelling “Hah” while making a sword move. I did, and made the stick guns too. Little girls have their make believe world too, just different toys.
I’ll bet you could even shoot rubber bands with that.
One Christmas my wife and I gave the grandsons light sabers for Christmas. A sword is a perfect gift for two young boys, especially boys of Japanese, Norwegian, and Scottish descent. Their living room, and the furniture became a scene from the Three Musketeers. Those two little guys were exhausted, and at the end of the day I told my son our work is done here, it’s time for your mom, and I to go home.
I have many fond memories of making rubber band guns with my cousins, when we were kids running around the back yard. As long as we didn’t aim at the face, our folks were pretty lenient. Our vast supply of little green army men took the brunt, though.
I have decided my 9yr old is not ready for real guns after he looked down the barrel of a Nerf gun to see why it wasn’t firing and shot himself in the eye with a dart. It was a good object lesson, I guess.
That’s good parenting. Teach’em young to stow their piece before entering civilization.
I grew up in a house with guns. We were taught to respect them. We were also taught to fire them from a fairly young age.
If you really want the kid to be lethal, teach him how to make a slungshot. (No, that is not a typo.)
Two young men in our house found my son’s blow dart. They took off after the cat. Now, that thing can easily be lethal to a cat if operated correctly. It is now in the safe with the guns. Where it should have always been.
And the young men are now out back under the yard?
Obvious question: What does his father say about that?
The first generation of feminist mothers tried like the dickens to make their boys into girls, and they were extremely frustrated when the boys remained boys. They took away any toy that so much as resembled any kind of weapon, gave the boys dolls and kitchen sets to play with, and made sure nothing in their environment was any shade of blue. Yet, time and again the boys found twigs and branches to use as guns, and insisted on being boys. Human Nature always wins out.
They were just kids. Our fault for not having secured the thing.
His (you know whats) are hanging just inside the ladies room.
(don’t get mad, it’s a joke!)
Christina Hoff Sommers gives the example of researchers who tried to get boys to play with dolls by making a water game out of it. The boys turned the dolls into torpedoes.
My mom did the same thing with me. One day, she looked out the kitchen window to check on me as I played in the back yard with all the neighborhood boys. They were running around with their toy pistols and M16’s and then there was me. I was running around screaming “bang” with a bunch of clothes pins fashioned into the shape of a gun. My mom was mortified. Accepting her defeat, she waited for my dad to get home that evening and instructed him to immediately go out and buy me a toy gun in fear that other kids and parents would think that there was something very wrong with me.