No guns, no knives & no boxing. Guns are for killing and I want no part in it. I've taken my pacifist nature for granted all of these years and assumed that my children would just stay away from these things. And my grand scheme could have very well worked... if I had baby girls instead of my two boys.
For the past five years I've filtered toys and made big decisions. Like: "Is a water gun really a gun?" (no, as long as it's brightly colored) and "Is Mr. Freeze's freeze gun okay?" (only if you're okay with those pointy bat things that Batman has too). I've warned Liam to stay away from the neighbors with their bee bee guns (yet somehow I found one of those yellow bee bees in my front garden after the snow melted). And I've hoped that this is good enough. I thought I was in the clear because Liam never showed an interest in those little green army guys.
But then Liam became more worldly. He started wanting Transformers and Bakugans and Superheros. They all come with weapons... usually attached. You can still buy friendly Zhu Zhu pets... for your little girl. For boys there are King Zhu's that come with very sharp looking swords. We went from being a house with no guns to house with at least 25 toy guns (water guns not included). I mean, we don't have any toy with the sole purpose of being a gun, but we do have a lot of those little machine guns sticking out of cars, attached to the arm of a Superhero or Supervillian toy from McDonald's Happy Meals and even as parts of Lego sets. Apparently it wasn't enough to play with toys with guns, Liam also needs to act out fighting scenes and talk non-stop about shooting and fire and all sorts of violent topics.
I'm going to stop you from thinking "Well it's all of that violence he sees on TV." The most violent thing Liam sees on TV is SpongeBob (I"m not a fan but he sneaks it in). He watches mostly PBS. That's not to say he hasn't seen anything violent. There's fighting in so many different movies- from Bolt to The Incredibles. And it may have been a mistake for Bill & I to take Liam out to his first movie, Kung Foo Panda (he was too young to really care much for the attacking tiger guy). But this too is becoming harder and harder to avoid. For example, is Superman too violent? There's nothing quite like an epic battle in a junkyard between a bad Superman and Clark Kent, now is there. But it's a classic so how can we not expose him to Superman.
Maybe a deeper question here is, what is our culture's attachment to violence? How do we stack up to other cultures? Am I just being a "fuddy duddy" (it wouldn't surprise me, I've been called that before)?
I would like to think talking about violence, and the mere act of naming it "violent" is helping to defer some of the effects with Liam. How much does a 5 year old really understand the concept of death anyway? When he sees a Transformer smash down a building (okay, somehow he must have snuck in that cartoon) does he realize that smashed buildings really do have people inside? Am I taking the whole thing too seriously when I tell him I've seen smashed buildings and that seeing them fall was one of the saddest days of my life?
Maybe there are pacifist toys out there, perhaps a chef Transformer who comes with a cooking utensil or an athletic Bakugan with a golf club. Chances are Liam would walk right past them though to buy the Nerf gun. If this is a war against violence, I think I've lost this battle.
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