Chad Love: Toy Guns Don’t Make Kids Killers

It’s always refreshing to see a person reject “liberal” versus “conservative” politics in favor of non-partisan rationality, and a good example of this can be found in this essay on the “liberal”-leaning news site Salon.

From the story:

_I was a violent kid. More than anything, I loved to play war. In my basement, I built a sandbag foxhole out of stacked-up sofa pillows. I would hide inside and peer out at what I imagined were the smoking slopes of Iwo Jima, crawling with Japanese soldiers ready to fight to the death.
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_My parents were liberal. More than liberal: Unitarians. We had a National Organization for Women poster hanging in our kitchen. A family friend stayed with us at the house while going through a sex change. My dad was, and probably still is, an advocate of the most draconian gun control proposals ever drafted, or even pondered. I’m sure both my parents voted for Carter, probably Dukakis, too. I remember a lot of family skinny dipping. Hell, my parents wouldn’t even let me play on a football team.

Our family stood in sharp contrast to the countless Americans who grow up not only with toy guns, but also with real guns, as a routine part of life. Guns were anathema to my parents. Period. Guns were bad. That included toy guns.

Fast-forward 30 years, and now I am the proud parent of two children. Lovely wife. Cute brick row house. A waggly tailed, big old yellow dog. I either did something right or got really lucky, or both. Like many young parents, I’ve learned that despite all my whining about my Unitarian parents, I’ll be lucky to be half as patient, evenhanded, thoughtful and engaged with my kids as my folks were with me, even during my lengthy jackass stage.

That does not mean, however, that I have to do everything exactly the way they did. Now, I have a son. He is just turning 4. And I have decided to arm him to the teeth._

As the father of a well-adjusted and completely normal child who also happens to think R. Lee Ermey’s “Lock N Load” is the coolest show on television and who recently informed his parents that he wants to be a “gun expert” when he grows up, I commend the “liberal” author’s rejection of the ridiculous notion that toy guns somehow turn kids into killers. It shows that maybe, just maybe, common sense is more powerful than political ideology.