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Won't someone give her a gun? Or not?

14:45 / 30.09.05

Partly using this excellent thread as a jumping off point I was wondering what Barbelith's view is on toy guns.

Do you think children should be allowed to play with them, simply as a method of creative and imaginitive play?

Did you play with toy guns as a child? If not, was this because your parents didn't approve of it, or you made the decision yourself? If so, do you think it gave you any particular view on guns in later life?

Is playing with guns these days less acceptable than it was, say, a generation ago when gun crime perhaps wasn't as prevalant as it is today?

Does playing with guns give a child a more war-like/violent outlook on life?

Just wondering.

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15:05 / 30.09.05

mine doesn't have any...wouldn't buy him one...

15:09 / 30.09.05

I'm not decided about this one. I'm a fairly pacific bloke but I grew up in a time when we all had toy guns and I certainly enjoyed playing with mine, although I never developed a fetish about them, as many people seem to when the grown ups around them are playing with real guns.

We did have a few local kids who played with air rifles and it seemed to go by default that if they had wanted them to begin with, they would then use them to hone their psychopathy by shooting at the local wildlife and the local domestic pets. But those guys were the kind who tortured animals, blew up frogs with straws, threw cats in the fat fryer etc. so without the guns they would still have been wreaking havoc.

The guns for us other, milquetoast kids would be part of the kit you'd acquire for playing at cowboys or World War II or The Man From Uncle. They had no more resonance than a bandana and a tin sheriff's badge or an empty cigarette packet that you pretended had a radio transmitter in it.

The bullies who would beat the crap out of you and keep you in fear used their fists and their knowledge of child psychology, not bits of moulded plastic, They would steal your toy gun and break it. Not much imagination involved in their play.

15:09 / 30.09.05

If a child really wants to play guns, s/he'll find a way. They'll make one out of Lego, or simply point a block or a truck or a stick at you and yell "BANG BANG!"

That's the imaginative play process. "Realistic" plastic guns are entirely surplus to requirements.

15:27 / 30.09.05

Hmmm tricky this. I used to have a number of toy guns, and even a couple of air guns later on, and I don't think it did me any harm. However I'd have to think about giving my (extremely hypothetical) child one, because when you examine them toy guns are a deeply weird concept.
I guess it would depend on context, maybe I'd give them (nearly typed "him" there which I suppose says a lot about my stereotypes) one but explain the difference between playing with guns and the reality of guns. Possibly I'd be more happy with toy laser guns, rather than a toy M16.
As I said earlier, tricky, but I reckon I've got plenty of time to work it out.

15:35 / 30.09.05

We did have a few local kids who played with air rifles and it seemed to go by default that if they had wanted them to begin with, they would then use them to hone their psychopathy by shooting at the local wildlife and the local domestic pets.

Wayull… To take my position as an exception to prove that rule, I had airguns as a kid but could never have brought myself to hurt anything with them. Even when asked (to cull the squirrels in a neighbour’s garden) I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
In fairness, they were never ‘toys’ per se, and I would have been 14 or 15 when I got my first one, but I had cap guns and spud guns and so on when I was a nipper, and I’m probably the least violent person you’ll ever meet.

Interesting question though. If I had kids I don’t think I’d ban them from playing with toy guns. In fact, there’s a bit of me that might be quite happy for them to become familiar with real guns. Nothing quite brings home how dangerous these things are than first hand experience. And better to get that experience on the non-business end. They are also beautiful pieces of engineering and I feel weirdly pro them for that reason.

Hmmm, will probably come back to this too.

15:36 / 30.09.05

Currently, my main problem with toy guns is tripping over them in the dark.

They should be burned, I say.

------

More seriously, I don't think there's a correlation between gun violence and toy guns any more than there's a correlation between toy trucks and job-seeking in the transportation sector.

I'm not particularly fond of them, but I'm also not very anti-gun in general. (I'm sure I've explained this at greater length elsewhere -- I'm not an NRA Constitutionalist by a long shot ((ha!)), but I'm also not very fond of most prohibition measures.)

16:01 / 30.09.05

I don't specifically remember having a toy gun as a child, but I'm sure I at least had the normally gun-shaped water pistols. as a teenager, I had a special affinity for cap guns, which I still look at longingly in the toy aisle of cheap shops.

however, I really do not like the idea of guns in general, and as such I do not allow toy guns in my home. not because I believe that violent toys (and movies, etc) breed violent children - I don't. I think insensitivity to others breeds violence, and if you allow that crap but don't bother to talk to your kids about it THEN there's a chance that you might be in trouble.

guns are objects which may or may not serve a useful purpose, and keeping your child ignorant of such objects (LIKE SEX AND SCANDALOUS BOOKS AND CURSE WORDS) does not serve to protect them from them. but the deliberate ban (which includes pointing ones finger at another person as if to shoot them) has raised discussions on the matter, which I think is a far more useful tool than any ban.

am I making sense? I knew what I MEANT to say, but it doesn't look as if I have managed it. this is why I stay out of headshop these days.

16:19 / 30.09.05

Not one finger, two fingers- the innate gun is the index and middle fingers pointed, and a PEEYOWN! noise. Get it right.

Slightly more seriously, I'm all for toy guns, but if I lived in the US I might not be. The fact that guns are just things in movies makes it ok somehow, like laser pistols or death rays. I'd be more concerned by a magic wand of death (Avadakevadra!!) than a plastic pistol but that's just me.
I'm especially pro-waterpistol, good clean fun.

16:47 / 30.09.05

Yup, tricky. I think an outright ban would probably make them all the more interesting, though. Both me and my brother used to have all sorts of cap guns and spud guns, and access to air rifles. Being a bit of a poncy fraidycat child (I still am), I was always wary of the air rifles, but was quite happy with the cap guns (we had some very cool replicas from a wild west show that ran at a local stately home) and had one of the first water pistols that looked like a machine gun. I grew out of it, my brother didn't. I think he still has an air pistol lurking somewhere, and he has some really nasty Black Widow catapults. He's never used them against anything alive, but it's interesting that we went different ways.
I think there's something slightly different about it these days, though. In the late 1970s gun violence was almost entirely unknown in Britain, so the bang bang you're dead had no resonance with anything in the real world. It was about James Bond, Blakes 7 - a different world. Now, with the role models being real people using real guns (Fiddy fucking cent et al) it's probably more difficult for kids to keep that healthy dissociation between play and reality.
Also, in our day no-one would have expected a child to have a real gun, so no matter how realistic the cap guns were you could probably have waved one in the face of even the most nervous old lady or copper and they wouldn't even have flinched. Now you'd be lucky not to get a court order or shot.
Tough call, but I think on balance - as long as they don't look too much like real guns - there's not a problem. Let them get bored with it early, perhaps.
Water pistols? Anything goes.

17:29 / 30.09.05

If a child really wants to play guns, s/he'll find a way. They'll make one out of Lego

which is precisely what I did, as well as sticks, cardboard etc. My parents didn't want me to have toy guns, as well other things like Action Man, but as far as insulating me from militaristic imagery goes they hadn't a hope in hell. What's the point of not letting somebody have an Action Man when they watch TV and read war comics? Let alone all of my dad's sci-fi books. They gave up after a while.

It was only when I started getting into RPGs that I developed any anal obsessive interests in calibres, stopping power etc, but anal obsessive interests are pretty common in teenage boys anyway. I don't think any of it changed my behaviour one way or the other. It's not having toys when they were younger that leads to kids or adults carrying guns.

I think the main issue nowadays in the UK anyway is the danger of somebody phoning the police if they see a kid wandering around with anything that looks like a gun. I used to have cap-gun fights with friends in the park next door; wouldn't do that now.

I certainly wouldn't let a child of mine anywhere near anything potentially harmful like an air gun or a catapult without strict supervision. I was annoyed at my dad when he took the fun out of having an air gun by insisting I was hiding behind a wall to fire it, could only fire it at targets properly insulated to avoid ricochets and so on, which to set up took hours, but I can see his point now; I was and am a clumsy bastard and there would have undoubtedly have been bleeding fingers, broken windows and angry neighbours.

The thing I feel cross about looking back is the cadet force at my school, who encouraged kids into military fetishism by letting them play with real guns as well as, more importantly, bringing them half into a supposedly adult world. If anyone tried to glamourise the Army to a child of mine they'd be in trouble. The culture we live in is bad enough.

17:34 / 30.09.05

My observations about airguns must be wide of the mark, unless Phox and Smoothly have a secret Dirty Harry side. And I wouldn't want to disrespect either of them, in case they do.

I abhor gun culture in a more general sense though, so I can see the objection. But in the specific instance of toy guns, I'm with Jack. Kids will play with pretend guns whether or not you buy them shiny plastic ones that go pop.

My dad bought me real leather footballs, football boots, boxing gloves, and all manner of manliness-building stuff. None of it worked. Instead, I played with my sisters' dolls and practised interior decor skills with empty cornflake boxes and scavenged materials, building home-made doll's houses.

I don't think toy guns would screw a kid up on their own. A screwed up kid probably would find a plastic gun that makes a slight banging noise fairly tame. We used to buy caps and just explode them with our teeth, well into early adolescence, without any toy gun mechanism to assist.

17:57 / 30.09.05

I got my mum to buy me a black widow the other day (I'm 30) but despite the temptation I don't use it to knock off seagulls. It's great for shooting stones at the pier though, or at beercans. We used to play paintball with gatguns, (the least powerful handgun in the world, with a one in ten thousand billion chance of blowing your head clean off- d'you feel really, really unlucky, punk?) and I've never had the urge to get a real one.

On the other hand, at Uni we had a water pistol arms race that was more fun than anything.

18:02 / 30.09.05

the least powerful handgun in the world, with a one in ten thousand billion chance of blowing your head clean off

Yup, I got "accidentally" shot in the face by a ricochet from one of them. Light scratch on upper lip.

18:49 / 30.09.05

We used to buy caps and just explode them with our teeth,

STRONG!

19:20 / 30.09.05

TRUTH!

(BUT NO TOOTH!)

19:24 / 30.09.05

Those catapults are way worse than airguns, though, unless the gun's been modified. A ball bearing from a Black Widow can take your eye out just as easily as a pellet and it goes further. One of my flatmates at university used to use it to knock slates off the rooves of neighbouring houses (he always missed the pigeons).

19:36 / 30.09.05

Sax, you should go for broke and help her build her own trebuchet. It may be brutal but it will be educational.

Or, like Wednesday Addams, she might take the goth route and decapitate her dolls with a tiny guillotine.

Withiel: DALI'S ROTTWEILER

19:45 / 30.09.05

I always found it very amusing that despite the fact that I was forbidden toy guns while living on an RAF base guarded by men with, er, guns, and devoted to, you know, raining death from above and all that. Not that that stopped me: I remember many happy hours spent with a hairdryer that I'd modified after it had been thrown away. And I agree with cube that any of the games in which guns were involved were all fairly innocuous in that they tended to be sci-fi- or Ian Fleming-inspired, albeit with a little more technical detail due to the fact that we were all Forces children.
However it is interesting to note that I discovered a friend of mine* had suffered some fairly horrific bullying while in a school cadet force, which would feed into the idea of specifically militaristic "role playing" being harmful. This being in a school where the cadets were allowed to wear their military uniforms in lessons on days when they practised, and also to carry (I don't know the term, but held at the hip and pointing forwards rather than shouldered) guns from the armoury to the rifle range in formation, a route which took them through several busy areas. My point being that children's play is fairly violent in tone regardless of the actual /content/, but it seems that more realistic additions might be genuinely harmful, in promoting a sense of power and superiority over others, perhaps? Oddly, I can't conceive of giving any hypothetical child of mine a toy gun (waterpistols aside), but that's more because I think that directly representational toys stunt the imagination. As wanky as that might sound.

*Actually not me, despite the convention.

20:31 / 30.09.05

Oh, yeah. Just remembered that a couple of kids I played with at school. They were adopted twins. Don't know quite what their gun-as-kids history was, but when they were about 15 one of them blew the forearm off his brother with a farmer's shotgun. I think that the shooter was more enthusiatic with the index-and-middle-finger gun than the other in Falklands reinactements, though.

08:07 / 01.10.05

Am just remembering having a cap pistol as a girl (I'd say around 9-10yrs), and the feeling of holding it. I remember a sense of power, or at least 'specialness' about owning/touching this object, and there was something slightly dangerous/daring about putting your finger in the trigger position and pulling (partly to do with the cost of caps and 'wasting' them I think). Anyone else recall feelings like these? I'm trying to work through what the relevance of this is? It would appear that I was aware of the symbolism between replica and real, and that 'real' guns were dangerous/scary, something I was tapping into with my play. I also remember this pistolette being a prized, special toy, one I was dead chuffed to receive. Hmmme, where's this going??

12:18 / 01.10.05

We had a toy gun around in the living room for a while to see what people would do. They pick it up, point it at the thing they're attending to, and shoot it if they don't like it or they're bored. Scary, it's almost universal and unconscious, like a wand it's a focus for attention. And saying bang! of course. People recoil from having it pointed at them as well, a toy gun- weird.

12:50 / 01.10.05

That's pretty cool, Quantum. Do you usually run psychological tests on friends and family? It's like what the penguin conservationist says on Futurama, "here's your rifle; the original point-and-click interface".

I had cap guns and waterpistols as a kid and I don't have any lasting fetish for smooth, cold guns in my hands. Just aching to pull the trigger. Nope. (joking!).

I'm pretty much a laid back person and my two brothers (14 and 16? I think) are too, so I don't think toy guns have any lasting effect. Like Quantum said, they're just props for play and - being British - are pretty much as unreal as a flying horse or whatnot. The only people who are going to latch onto guns are people with deeper issues, I think.