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Guns are NOT toys and should not be treated as such in even a pretend fashion. I think it's weird that people let young kids play with toy guns and allow them to play shoot each other. What is the purpose of this kind of play?
When I was younger my sister found my fathers gun in a closet and actually aimed it at me. I remember being scared. Fortunately it was NOT loaded and she never actually pulled the trigger, but just thinking about what could have happened is awful.
I am not against guns. I think people should be allowed to have them. I also believe that people should be properly trained in firearms and safety. I am even okay with kids learning to shoot guns and going hunting as long as they are properly trained, supervised and are not allowed to play with or have access to a gun when parents are not around.
That is on your Parent's for not teaching your sister what guns can do and how dangerous they can be. I grew up with guns. My kids have grown up around guns and both love to hunt and shoot now.
That being said, a toy gun is a toy. It's no more a weapon than a video game. It is up to US as a Parent to make sure they know the difference and that a gun can kill.
Gun play in young children is actually all about morality. It's about exploring what is right and wrong. It is also about saving people. Young children become the powerful rescuer through this kind of play. They also try out different roles including being the *bad guy.* And, it helps kids combat their fears.
Kids need to develop life skills that revolve around resolving conflicts and while we don't want them to get the idea that resolving conflicts should be done using weapons, playing this out allows the kids to learn how to react to violence and how to resolve conflicts in other ways.
Trust your children. Really. You cannot censor their play. As for using toy guns, swords or other weapons, if a preschooler cannot have the toy prop, they will use legos to build them or use their fingers or bite their sandwiches into the shape of a gun. Preschoolers are very interested in being powerful and that is what guns symbolize in their play.
sorry I call BS for most of this--especially about morality and conflict resolution.
I keep hearing this but honestly I haven't seen most preschoolers doing that. Older boys sure, once they start watching the more violent cartoons, but not the little ones I've seen around here, who mainly watch educational-type shows and are not brought up in households with guns or hunting.
Interesting. Have these boys missed watching things like Power Rangers or Star Wars? Maybe they don't have older brothers, sisters or cousins? What about water guns?
Aggressive play is a normal stage of development. Rough and Tumble play is also important and even without props, you will see preschoolers wrestling. There are some gender differences with boys more prone to this type of play than girls. I am surprised that you don't see it, but perhaps this has to do with where you are watching the children play. Most preschools and schools discourage it, but you will see it more in the park.
Interesting. Have these boys missed watching things like Power Rangers or Star Wars? Maybe they don't have older brothers, sisters or cousins? What about water guns?
Aggressive play is a normal stage of development. Rough and Tumble play is also important and even without props, you will see preschoolers wrestling. There are some gender differences with boys more prone to this type of play than girls. I am surprised that you don't see it, but perhaps this has to do with where you are watching the children play. Most preschools and schools discourage it, but you will see it more in the park.
In the park they run, climb, slide, swing, ride bikes and scooters, play with sand, etc. I posted on here once about seeing a group of boys (russian incidentally) playing a particularly aggressive game to the point of being disturbing, and the reason it surprised me is that I don't usually see that.
DS loves rough-and-tumble play with dad, wrestling and such, but the most "aggressive" he's gotten with a playmate was trying to chase and pour sand on each other
I consider toy guns to be an inappropriate children's toy.
40 years ago, when this topic came up, my Mom laughed and said you can take the toy guns away from children, but they will still play cops/robbers or cowboys/indians by holding their fingers like guns.
One thing I have noticed quite a few parents do is ban "toy guns" just because they are violent or seem to think it'll harm the kids psyche in some way. I never really understood it, I know plenty of kids that grew up "shooting each other" and such and they still came out as law abiding citizens, whereas I have known kids that were banned from them yet ended up with a fascination with guns anyway.
While I only have a daughter she played with them a lot when she was a kid and would go around shooting the other kids and just having a fun time. She's never been a violent person though.
I personally think it's way overkill and the worry that playing around with toy guns will make them more violent/make them want to play with real guns more is totally not true, at the very least in the very tiny amount of cases.
I'd like to hear your thoughts though. Is there any study on it or such even?
We never had any toys that looked like guns except really brightly colored water guns. OTOH, we had a real handgun and two rifles in the house so I suspect my parents did not want us getting confused when we were very little. Guns were something we all had fun using, especial target practice with the .22 but never a toy, and never something kids were encouraged to think of as fun to use when pointing at another person.
My daughter started a little older, early teens I think, before she learned to shoot. She actually was the most into it and the best at it. She didn't even have water guns, so go figure.
sorry I call BS for most of this--especially about morality and conflict resolution.
Actually it's true. Here's a good article on it. One of my fondest memories as a kid was when my father made some wooden swords and we would have "fights" in the back yard. Even at 43 I can still remember them as if it were yesterday and I am a woman lol. But for boys especially I agree that playing cowboys and indians and cops and robbers is a healthy thing to do, we so often look far to much from an adult's perspective and think kids will think like us but it's not, kids know it's just pretend.
Just like letting kids get down and dirty and scrape their knees is important, it's important to let them have their fun and imaginative play. I have been looking around and everything I have read shows there is no correlation between kids that play with toy guns and kids that grow up to be violent. I feel too many parents (in particular mothers) see ANYTHING construed as "violent" as bad and thus must be squashed, but I see that as a disservice, especially if you are raising boys that need to get their aggression out somehow in a healthy way, just like sports.
Not trying to say anything bad about single mothers here, but one thing I have noticed about lots of young guys I have known that are real weak and wimpy is they were often raised by single mothers that wouldn't allow them to do ANYTHING "violent" and it's sad.
Last edited by PeaceAndLove42; 04-11-2014 at 06:08 PM..
I played with cap pistols in the early 60s, and my son had Nerf guns in the 90s, but I think the answer depends partly on the environment and the type of toy gun. A 13-year-old, Andy Lopez, was shot to death in Santa Rosa, CA a few months ago because he was carrying a realistic-looking automatic rifle type of gun in a neighborhood with a lot of gang violence. When officers shouted at him to drop the gun, he turned, and apparently it was raised so one of the officers felt threatened, and shot and killed him. Of course there has been endless debate about the incident, but the fact is, the gun had the orange tip missing or painted over, so there really was no way for the officer to know it was a toy from that distance. Therefore, I think those kinds of toy guns are a very bad idea for certain kids in certain environments. Even the orange tip is no guarantee of safety because those could be painted on a *real* gun. A lime green water pistol or Nerf gun, no problem, as far as I'm concerned.
Yes. I really wasn't allowed but my Uncle did allow me to shoot his .22 and .38 a few times. I bought my kids a Pistol bb gun and a Rifle bb gun for christmas.
I had toy guns when I was very young. I learned to shoot a .22 rifle when I was 8 (and I was somewhat behind most of my peers who had learned at about 6), I was taught to shoot a handgun by a Texas Ranger at 11 or 12. (Never quite got the same hang of that as the rifle, and still prefer a rifle, I'm just better with it.) We were also taught gun safety, respect for guns, and how to handle them and how NOT to handle them - took the "forbidden fruit" mystery away and made it just another tool, no more likely to be sneaked out and played with illicitly than a screwdriver.
When our first child was born in the early 1970's, being good hippies, we forbade playing with toy guns, as did all of the good hippie parents of the kids that our son grew up with. We both volunteered at a church day care for little ones, and we taught them all about how guns were B.A.D. We did own the original .22 rifle that my Daddy taught me to shoot all those years ago, but it was in pieces in three different rooms, up high, with the ammunition in yet another room, and we never used it - it was more along the lines of a family heirloom.
When our son picked up a stick and pretended it was a gun, we had The Talk with him. When I discovered him eating a piece of bread into the shape of a gun so he could play with it, I sat myself down and had a serious talk with myself. We decided that perhaps we were messing with something developmentally necessary and we should not let our ideology interfere with our son's development.
He doesn't have guns now (well, he does, but it lives at our house and he probably doesn't even remember having it). He's one of the most peaceful people I can imagine.
Our daughter got her own .22's, a pistol and a rifle, when we moved out to the ranch when she was 12. They were used for target shooting and varmint shooting (the latter mostly by me after she moved out - I believe in sharing the world with critters, but when a rattlesnake bites my horse or my dog, they forfeit the right to hang around the home place). Didn't hurt her any, either.
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