Taking away kids’ toy guns is un-American
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Mike Thomas

October 29, 2002

Walt Disney World is coming under pressure to unilaterally disarm by eliminating all flintlocks of mass destruction from Frontierland.

How can you separate guns and the wild frontier? Do the disciples of political correctness think the West was won with an ACLU lawsuit?

I oppose toy-gun control in all its many guises. As a kid, they would have had to pry my Dick Tracy snub-nosed .38 revolver from my dead little fingers. I wore it in a shoulder holster under my coat when I went to Mass, ready to pull it out and blast the priest at Communion.

That’s when a boy was a boy, and the game of choice was “Guns.”

We ran up and down streets, cutting through yards, blasting away at one another, arguing endlessly because when one guy shouted, “Bam,” his intended target didn’t necessarily acknowledge getting hit.

“Guns” was an important part of our socialization. “Guns” taught us how to negotiate and set rules.

“Guns” was a transition between the innocence of childhood and the reality of the 6 o’clock news.

“Guns” was a game for everybody, not just those who could throw a baseball or shoot a basketball.

“Guns” got us out of the house, staying active, burning off those McDonald’s hamburgers. I recall no problem with childhood obesity then.

And if it was raining out, we played with our Army men, shooting them down with simulated gunfire in the form of finger-loaded rubber bands.

When I recount these stories with people in the aging hippie demographic, many nod enthusiastically because they also played with toy guns before discovering marijuana and pacifism.

None that I know of has crawled into a car trunk with a high-powered sniper rifle and shot strangers. And so I am skeptical of a growing national movement to disarm the children of today.

“Kids play with toys, at least in part, to rehearse for real life,” say experts from the prestigious Judge Baker Children’s Center in Boston. “As they play store, house, school and firefighter, they’re trying on roles and practicing being an adult by using the tools that adults use. Do we want them to practice using guns?”

Well, given the path George W. Bush is setting for our future foreign policy, yes.

Yet Toys “R” Us and eToys have stopped selling toy guns. Something that was completely harmless in the relatively sane society of the early ’60s suddenly has become inappropriate and dangerous in the insane ’00s.

Kids grab a real gun left out by their parents and shoot it, thinking it is a toy, and it is a toy-gun problem.

A robber uses a toy gun in a heist, and it is a toy-gun problem.

I don’t know if it’s because of all this, or simply changing generations, but I haven’t seen kids running around playing “Guns” in years. If they did, I imagine someone would call 911 and report a gang of armed terrorists invading the neighborhood, and the SWAT team would show up.

And so now many kids fester in their rooms, staring dumbly at a computer screen, eating sugar, splattering foes with cyber guns.

With toy guns, the violence never exceeded our own childish imaginations. Today, those who design computer games and write movie or television scripts fill in the gory details.

Toy guns do not poison minds.

Adults do.