Sunday, November 7, 2010

You'll Shoot Your Eye Out!

I know a lot of moms (and some dads too) are anti-guns and weapons when it comes to play things for their boys.  How you keep them from making their own weapons out of sticks, pieces of race track, and toilet paper tubes is something I'd be interested in hearing about though!

I don't feel very strongly on the subject.  I do give them some boundaries and rules regarding their use of weapons, but I do I allow them to mock fight and use foam swords and to let their creativity abound when it comes to fashioning their own weapons and hunting down "bad guys" in the back yard.  Their world is full of sticks and strings and interesting-shaped things that are just begging to be used in this manner!

So my boys play with weapons and feel quite heroic while doing it, I must say.  Today, they watched a bit of Robin  Hood before they tired of that and decided the day was just too beautiful to sit on a couch watching cartoons and they'd rather BE Robin Hood out in the backyard!

That is how I left things when I took off for the grocery store.  When I returned home, they had fully emersed themselves in the game and even enlisted the biggest boy: daddy (who is also a HUGE Robin Hood fan.)  Ben was busy shooting arrows at multiple targets with his home-made bow fashioned out of a piece of race track and a string (don't think that toy will work as a race track anymore...)  


Mitchell and Dad were up to worse though - they had out Matt's pellet gun and were shooting little yellow foam things all over the yard!  Now, these do not come out very fast and Mitchell was heavily supervised anyways, but that gun does not look like a toy and I cringe every time all three boys play with it together.  Although it looks it, it is not actually a dangerous toy - not unless, that is, you shoot it at your or someone else's eye!  

Boys are boys and, in my opinion, it is healthy for them to pretend to fight bad guys.  I love to watch them rescuing each other and other pretend characters.  But every time that ominous-looking toy gun comes out, the words of all the adult figures from "A Christmas Story" echo in my head: "You'll shoot your eye out!"  Someday that gun will mysteriously disappear and I will claim no knowledge of it's whereabouts...

5 comments:

  1. Kyle used to chew his sandwiches into the shape of a gun and then "shoot"!

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  2. when I was a kid, long before we could afford to be given much by way of real toys we fashoned out own weapons, as yours have done. Problem was we were a bit more creative and unsupervised in our huge backyard. We made bows out of stout saplings and arrows out of sticks and actually shot at eash other. As i recall one of the neighbood gang had to go to hosp for stiches in his head! How did we all survive to adulthood?

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  3. when very young, Rick and I tried to hang Vicki from the apricote tree as we had seen on some old b&w western before she could join our club. She would have none of of it. I shudder to think of the potential consequences if she had. Saints preserve us!

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  4. guns and boys go together, just like snakes and snails. they just need to be trained and supervised. aiden is not allowed to shoot people, so 'people'need to pretend to be deer, or bears, or elephants and then he can shoot them. it's kinda fun to crawl around being some creature and get shot. brings lots of giggle from the mighty hunter

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  5. Grandma Kathy says: When Matt and Carl were little I did not like guns or violence, and so I didn't let them watch violent shows and I didn't buy them any toy guns. They were allowed to have "squirt elephants" which they were supposed to use to spray water. Well, of course they pretended the elephants were guns and they pretended to kill each other and all the neighbors with their squirt elephant guns. They also used legos, lincoln logs, sticks, and crackers as guns. And since they weren't allowed to shoot people, all the people had to pretend to be bad lions or bears or snakes so they could kill them. I finally gave up, boys and guns just go together. I guess it is part of the hunter, warrior, conqueror in men, that we all love.

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