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...
