My eight year-old son attended Cub Scout day camp a couple of weeks ago.
He has been Scouting for two years, and day camp has probably secured his devotion to Scouting through his 18th birthday, on which date I am going to put him on a plane to my mother's home in Canada and confiscate his U.S. passport for four years.
He doesn't earn it back until he has grown his hair out, pierced his tongue and learned to snowboard.
His soul was bought with BB guns: an hour of target practice each day.
This was thrilling for my son. We prohibit any kind of gunplay in our home. Not even water pistols are allowed. I do not prevent my children from playing with their friends' toy guns when they are visiting in someone else's home, butit is not something we do in ours. My kids are the gunplay equivalent of social smokers.
Until my firstborn was a toddler, I was fanatical. Not only did we not permit toy guns, we didn't even talk about them. A gun was that-which-cannot-be-named. One day, when my son was 2, he built an L shape with some Legos and pointed it at me. I squinted at him.
"What's that?"
"It's a pffffter," he said. He didn't know the word for gun.
I promptly confiscated it.
"No pffffting," I said, firmly.
As he grew older, it dawned on me that denial was probably neither a realistic nor an effective approach. Parents who don't want their children to have sex or smoke or use drugs or drink need to talk to their kids about sex, cigarettes, drugs and alcohol. I needed to talk to mine about guns. Early, and often.
I am not against guns, per se. And when I say guns here, I am referring to handguns and automatic weapons; guns designed for killing and wounding humans. I have nothing against skillful and responsible hunting of animals for food. I come from a Canadian province that is mainly rural.
I think my attitude toward guns is representative of the majority in Canada, and this is one of those areas where I still identify with being Canadian. Canada is not a country born of revolution (it was more by committee, which bequeaths its own issues, but that's another story).
The beloved Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution sounds eccentric to most of us - like some archaic law from the 18th century that hasn't made it off the books yet. The entrenchment of bearing arms as a right, not a privilege, seems about as relevant as prohibitions against witchcraft.
If only it were as harmless.
In recent months, two fatal shootings of children by adults took place in the state of Arkansas, where I live. The first killing was of a 12-year-old boy in West Memphis by a police officer. The child was running away with a toy gun that the police took to be real. The second killing was of a nine-year-old boy by a man, after the boy and some other children threw rocks at the man's house.
This is why we do not confuse guns with play in my home. It is not so much that I worry my children will confuse the two, but because the society we live in is, itself, confused.
In a country where an armed police officer could find it plausible that a 12-year-old child was also armed and dangerous, in a country where unreasonable people have guns within arm's reach, in a country where it is necessary to post "No weapons" signs on elementary schools and public libraries, I feel it is simply not appropriate.
I keep toy guns out of my children's hands in protest as much as from a desire to teach safety and responsibility.
In another society, another time, I might view plastic pistols and M-16s the same way I look at plastic swords: as an acceptable prop for a child's warrior play. As much as I respect responsible hunters, and soldiers who fight for a just cause, and police who really protect, I would happily ban real guns as well as the toy ones, if it would guarantee that another bullet would never enter a child's body ever again.
However, it wouldn't and it won't. My children have to grow up in the world as it is, not as I wish it to be. So I have drawn and redrawn my line. I never thought, when my son was two years old, that I would one day watch him take aim at a target with an air rifle, while a grown man in shorts and knee socks barked orders as if in a private militia camp in Montana.
I can't say I was entirely comfortable with it (although the shorts and knee socks were arguably the most disturbing aspect). But I didn't feel it was compromising my values either. If anything, I hope the yellow "Do Not Cross" tape, the safety goggles, even the guy with the General Patton complex, all conveyed the seriousness of this sort of play to my son. He's an intelligent, cautious child. I trust, given good information, he will make responsible choices when it comes to guns.
How I wish that were enough to protect him from them.
Kyran Pittman lives in Little Rock, Ark.
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