Toy gun, viewed innocently or not !

Caleo If you can manage to supervise children so that you can see what every single one is doing every single moment, I salute you. I know no one else who can do that.

How are children to grow into secure and independent adults if they never have a second of their life when they are not supervised? At what point do they cease to be children and become adutlts when the supervision suddenly ends?

Caleo

V3ra, a garden cane thrust up the nose can penetrate the brain. Children are sometimes in danger when they play. I'd not allow a child to stick a garden cane up anyone's nose. I would also stop kids in my charge running about with lolly sticks in their mouths.

Caleo I don't think my husband was "allowed" as such!
I think a lot of us as children were sent out to play and "get out from under my feet" by our mothers, I know I was. So we got up to all sorts that makes me wonder now how we survived.
I quite agree with your comment about the lolly sticks, especially those hard round lollies. An obvious choking hazard and yes, I absolutely ban them here.

Vera, when I was a kid me and my chum used to make long bows and arrows from garden canes, and use them to try to hit birds. This was eighty years ago, and parents now would not let their kids play at harming birds. (Unless they are the sort of parents who themselves play at shooting birds for fun).

I know small boys play fighting games, but there have always been parents who would discourage fighting games, as not only are they potentially dangerous, but they encourage the boys to grow up thinking fighting is okay. Fighting was okay when a society was not civilised.

V3ra, a garden cane thrust up the nose can penetrate the brain. Children are sometimes in danger when they play. I'd not allow a child to stick a garden cane up anyone's nose. I would also stop kids in my charge running about with lolly sticks in their mouths.

Monica, maybe realistic toy guns are not sold any more. The last time I was play-threatened by a small boy with a realistic toy gun was in the 1990s.

My husband and his brother used to play Zulu warriors using garden canes as spears.
Apparently when you stick a cane up your brother's nose there's an awful lot of blood...

Since guns are almost impossible to buy or own in this country, yet small boys (and some girls) go through a phase of liking having guns, but if you look anywhere selling toy guns, you will be hard-pressed to find anything that looks remotely like a gun, they are all made from vivid coloured plastic and their design owes far more to space fiction than armaments. Thinking back, my children loved having water guns when they played in their paddling pool - and bubble guns.

Oh, my goodness, they were water pistols1 Do you know, until this minute I never even saw those as guns, because they weren't - they were toys for splashing people with water, all sorts of containers were used for that.

I am now beginning to worry about all those people that had swords as children. With the growth of knife crime, do you think that that has happened because those walking round with knives on them all the time have played with swords as children?

Think of our kitchens, full of knives, that we use to chop and gouge and slice. What a deplorable example we are setting our children!

I only remember brother having a cap gun---but that was enough for me as I couldn't stand the noise so I threw the gun over a hedge and that was the end of that, or so I thought. The caps didn't need a gun and were still bought using a brick to make them bang At least it was never allowed inside the house, so I'd won, in a way.

I don't even remember buying my stepson a gun when he was young, so they haven't featured at all in the family really. Nothing nice about them at all.

The old cowboy films have a lot to answer for, though tame compared to todays gun crime.

The boy neighbours used to make bows and arrows and they were as bad, as regards scary, whittling the ends of sticks to a point.

It's the age we live in now I suppose.

An interesting post AreWeThereYet.
Bisley shooting ground has been in existence for over 100 years and is well known and respected in the area.

An interesting and unusual hobby and you clearly became accomplished at the sport.

It’s good to hear the other side of the ‘wicked guns’ debate, although of course it goes without saying that guns, in the wrong hands can have devastating consequences, so we can never be blasé about them.

The fault lies with the evil individual who gets their hands on one though rather than the gun itself.
I believe the late Duke of Edinburgh made a similar comment once.

Caleo and I will say that there is absolutely no evidence to support what you say.

What children become when they grow up is gained from home attitudes as a whole. Although as Scentia shows, even upbringing is not destiny.

And I totally agree with AreWeThereYet. My father, grandfather and uncles were all in the army. neither my sisters, nor my cousins, nor even the adults in the army ever showed any tendency to violence, public or private. My father, domestically, was completely non-violent.

Caleo. There is nothing wrong with Lap Dancing when an adult.
Playing with Guns will obviously not make you into a killer, no matter what you grow up seeing and doing the will and need to kill comes from within and a lack of respect for life. I grew up seeing pornography as a child (long long story) but I am not a rapist/prostitute/sex addict or peodophile. I would be made to shoot cats and birds by my father and be forced to kill our chickens but I would never kill a living being now. I would be sent to steal milk from neighbours doorsteps, I am not a thief!!

Oh gosh that was a bit long. Sorry.

This is going to make me unpopular I know but I have little problem with guns, toy or otherwise. Before I go any further I am not advocating that people need guns to protect themselves or think just anybody should be allowed to own one.

Apart from playing cops and robbers and cowboys and indians when we were children I was brought up with real guns, rifles and pistols, from the age of 10. By the age of 16 I was shooting for Wales Ladies and Juniors teams. Two of my brothers belonged to the same gun club, my father was our coach and he shot regularly at Bisley competitions. We were taught from day 1 how to handle guns and ammunition safely and none of us has ever been tempted to kill anyone. In 10 years I never heard of an accident at a gun club. Everyone who joined the club was vetted by the police and I know of three people who were turned down, so vetting wasn't just for form. Competition shooting, which is the reason most people legally have guns other than hunting, is a very real skill and takes practice and training. Most of the people I knew who owned guns left them locked up in the gun club safe, not at home. I have never owned a gun, or wanted to own one. Apart from my father no one in the family has. To suggest that any interest in guns is putting you on the road to becoming a mass murderer is like saying someone interested in herbs is planning to poison someone.

Just to clear my conscience fully I have to admit to doing archery also for a year or two. Never killed anyone that way either. Or with my knitting needles or crochet hooks.

Knife and gun crime is rising, though, and the parents of those committing these crimes are presumably people who were bought up not being allowed to play with toy replicas, for the most part.

My point, Monika, is that when parents or teachers legitimate the child's plaything or the child's game, the child learns the real life thing or behaviour is okay.

When Quentin Tarantino was asked whether his violent movies are being played out in the real world he got very stroppy and refused to answer. He doesn't like being asked that. Clockwork Orange was linked to a couple of murders and a rape and was withdrawn from UK cinemas at Stanley Kubrik's request after his family received threats, and was not seen in the UK for 27 years. Now it's shown on TV for all to see.

There is no doubt constant visions of violence on a screen affects young developing brains and we all know that some youngsters see 18+ movies and games at the age of 12 and can play these things for hours on end. When we were young there was no way we could see anything like that. Nothing excessively violent was shown on TV and even movies were tame, not that you could see an X movie as a child anyway, you had no access to the cinema.

Obviously not all youngsters who see these things will turn into a killer, but there is such an excessive amount of violence and murder amongst youngsters now and an almost blasé attitude towards killing someone. You have to ask where it comes from, because it was never there 30+ years ago before screen violence became part of their lives.

Even terrestrial tv seems to ignore the nine o’clock watershed nowadays, with soaps particularly guilty.

Of course these pale into insignificance compared with the awful video games already mentioned.

Another one that agrees with you JenniferEccles and in complete agreement with you Chestnut

The effect that the whole atmosphere of violence that comes with computer games has on children has long worried me and i wonder whether that now is playing out in tv output with so much drama being overtly violent or having an atmosphere of menace hanging over it? To be honest I barely watch tv these days as most of the output is so miserable and I notoriously dislike anything frightening or forboding.

I gave my DGS a Nerf gun for Christmas (at his request). He made no attempt to aim it at anyone, nor said anything about harming people, just went outside and aimed it at things in the garden and trying to work out its maximum range.

Agree JenniferEccles we all played cowboys and indians and there were never such awful incidents with school shootings as we now see. Of course we don't have guns here in the UK so the kids stab each other with knives instead. Again, nothing to do with pre-schoolers playing with toy guns.
My belief is that the media is responsible by making so many violent movies and games centred around shooting and killing. Kids start watching these movies and playing these vile 18+ games as young teens and the killing is engrained in their developing brains. In some cases I think they start to confuse fantasy with real life and when their lives go wrong in some way they go out and take revenge in the real world.
So if you want to blame anyone blame the people who produce these awful films and games. I believe they are responsible for the confusion in young developing minds.

It seems I’m in the minority here but I’m afraid I can’t get too worked up about a small boy innocently playing with a plastic toy gun.

I’m quite certain there’s no correlation between boys having a toy one as a child and then automatically turning to a life of crime.
It’s a ridiculous thought isn’t it?

I haven’t read the whole tread and this point has probably already been made but in our youth all children played cowboys and Indians with guns and bows and arrows, didn’t they?
Was this followed by a spate of gun crime a few years later or do we have more of a problem now when it appears most parents are horrified at the thought of toy guns?

So much of childhood these days is governed by the nanny State, with even conkers on a piece of string having being banned for a number of years now.

I would be more worried about children playing at drive by shootings in the computer games they seem to move on to.

Before most hand guns were banned we had several friends who took their children shooting every week. Children who learned how to handle guns and ammunition correctly and safely. Some of them went on to take up target shooting seriously - a deeply boring sport involving shooting dozens of holes in pieces of paper and mainly practiced by the sort of men who would otherwise be collecting stamps or cigarette cards. None of them ever showed any tendency towards violence or law breaking.

Caleo that is an entirely different subject connected to child abuse and such play may be a sign that a child is being abused or being allowed to see pornography. so is entirely irrelevant to the subject of this thread.

Why do you see the need to bring up a scenario which has wide connotations and links with the sexual abuse of children?

Would you let the kiddies play at lap dancers?

aggie My children grew up in a community Where guns are normal, their Father was in the Military, they often saw their Dad on Guard duty holding a SA80. It was normal to them.

hopsutal = hospital