I hope you and your son enjoy many frantic hours with your toy guns.

And as he reaps his first ill-gotten profits on the backs of the neighborhood kids, he'll be lost to Salon forever.

It's just great that you're running around having fun with your son. He will remember that about you until he dies or goes senile.

because his father fought in Vietnam, 101st Airborne. When he came home, he was tired of guns.

but I appreciate it anyway. As the liberal mother of three boys, I can tell you it's hardwired, and not in all of them. My first cared much more about cars, and I patted myself on the back till my arm hurt, but then I gave birth to No. 2, who wanted to play every kind of war. I didn't really buy him guns, but it's amazing how he managed to absorb the popular culture of those weapon-loving cartoons even without the actual weapons (and without having seen the shows). At age 16 (almost), I'm not a bit worried about his temperament or future. I think he'd make a great teacher, actually.

How dumb! This seems to be the worse equivalent of buying girls EVERYTHING in bright pink! Or at least if you play house with your kids there's a decent chance those are some skills they can put to good use when they grow up.

Just because kids are "hardwired" to be selfish and whiny doesn't mean we reinforce them and encourage them. By all means, whatever a kid wants to do, never ever say NO to them!

I was raised in a house with no toy guns; only real guns. The philosophy was, guns aren't toys. Guns are real. If you're interested in guns, you learn to shoot (safely, competently, with parental supervision & instruction of course). My wife and I are still considering - kids are still < 3, but we're probably going to go the same route.

Although it was not uncommon, where I grew up, for kids to have real guns and I received my first rifle @ the age of 12, I was never allowed to have a 'toy' gun either.

I wholeheartedly, and without irony, applaud your approach

Well played, sir!

A good companion to this essay is "The Toys of Peace," by the english satirist Saki (HH Munro). The idea of 'engineering' the bloodlust out of young boys was in vogue at the time he penned it, shortly before WW1, and Saki drew much the same conclusion.

Alas, Saki died in the trenches and the story was released in a posthumous collection of the same name. Irony? More like inevitability, perhaps.

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/ToysPeac.shtml

What do you want, a cookie?

Horseshit. I have three nephews, all of them healthy, active kids. None of them has ever shown the slightest interest in guns or playing war. The whole idea that "boys love fighting" is a lazy sop to our gun-obsessed culture.

And no, neither my brother or his wife are granola liberals. In fact, mama watches Fox News. But neither are they assholes about the Second Amendment. They don't own any guns and don't act as if having one is necessary to life and limb.

Gee, I guess some kids really can soak up common sense from their parents. Who'd'a thunk it?

Nice essay. I laughed. You sound like a very fun dad!

My older son is so tender-hearted that he invented vegetarianism for himself (decided it was wrong to eat animals before he had ever met someone with the same belief.) Hasn't had a bite of meat in four years now. At nine, he has a sense of justice and fairness, and a keen nose for adult hypocrisy and bullshit. I call him my mad philosopher, because he also loves battles and bad guys, Star Wars and Pokemon.

For some - most? all? - children, play with heroes and monsters and good guys and bad guys/wizards/soldiers is about making concrete the shadows and fears that they barely understand about the big world around them, putting those fears into familiar roles, and figuring out the solutions in a safe fantasy world. Play is therapeutic for children. And the world of Star Wars is one my husband and sons spend many happy hours in together. Awesome!

(But, blasters ARE NOT guns. Please don't tell the other suburban moms they are :-)

Here's a sticker. Happy?

My older daughter loves construction equipment and thinks tanks are neat. Probably because she's 3 and they're big and noisy and kind of mind-boggling to someone so small and new. I don't think these things are somehow gender-programmed and predestined. If we were 16th century Crow Indians, she'd probably be in awe/fear/fascination of bison and thunderstorms.

There were never guns, real or toy, in our house, and only a few water guns in the backyard. We never played any remotely violent video game either. My parents, like yours, believed it would make us violent. Now my brother is a US Marine and shoots some of the biggest guns in the world. Go figure.

Too bad the author resides in D.C., a place so firmly anti-gun that a collection of plastic toy laser blasters can be sincerely referred to as an "arsenal".

And although I can appreciate that this piece isn't a kneejerk anti-gun reaction piece to some recent gun ownership statistic headline, it's almost just as depressing to read about a grown man who is afraid of owning a gun because he worries he'll shoot himself with it.

Even worse is the fact that so many other "men" in my age range cling to this mantle of incompetence, where they fear possessing something as powerful and liberating as a gun because they fear injuring themselves with it.

Unlike many of my fellow gun owners, I do not think there will be some cataclysmic showdown/doomsday that will pit the armed against the unarmed, but I do predict there will be hundreds of much more minor conflicts in which we shall carry no weapons other than our will to move through this world and mold it to our will. Substitute a gun for a checkbook. Substitute a gun for a dream. Take this deadly and powerful thing and turn it into your will. Actualize.

But don't swap it for a toy.