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 Toy
Guns
TBoys
will always be boys...only, they grow bigger. Little boys
seem to like war. Granted, big boys like guns and war as well, though
most of them are considerably less fond of it once they realize that
(1) war kills people and (2) once you’re dead, you
can’t get up five or ten seconds later and become alive
again.
As a kid I definitely knew about #1, but I wasn’t quite so
sure about #2. At the time I guess it didn’t matter
much. I didn’t have many toy guns as a kid. Though my parents
weren’t really outspoken about my having toy guns,
I’m pretty sure they didn’t like the idea much. So
when I was home I was usually more of the LEGO or Lincoln Log type.
However, my friends sure had toy guns. In fact, some of them had a lot
of toy guns.
Whenever I spent time at their houses we’d usually spend a
considerable amount of time playing with G.I. Joes and their guns or
our own, child-sized toy guns. Depending on how many of us were
gathered at any one time, our games involving toy guns changed quite a
bit. We staged huge, world-war one style firefights and
trench battles. We ran secret spy missions into enemy territory and
covert-ops battles under the cover of darkness. We fought in the woods
and in open fields, slaughtering each other every few minutes. If you
got killed, you had to stay on the ground for awhile, but eventually
you could get up as somebody else and rejoin the fight.
The armies in the movies and on TV always got reinforcements, so we
figured that we needed them as well. Though all of this
playing with toy guns probably didn’t permanently scar me, I
doubt that it did me a lot of good, either. Like Barbie dolls, toy guns
are still a hugely gender-specific toy. Though many parents
wouldn’t think anything is wrong with young boys playing war,
I wonder what they would think of their young daughters as Amazonian
warriors, blazing into battle with their peers. I’m thinking
that they would get worried a lot sooner. A lot of research
has gone into gender-biased toys and activities, and most researchers
agree that it really doesn’t do us a lot of good, down the
road.
The healthiest people and relationships are often the most androgynous
- with men doing their share of cooking, while women tries their hand
on occasionally putting up picture frames. These shared functions,
combined with the fact that it’s tough to justify glamorizing
war, creates a hard case in allowing toy guns to fall on the hands of
our children.
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