The original Pppptoo-ers post generated some of the most interesting discussion on the blog of late, so I thought I should follow up. Also, Noah continues to be interesting on the subject.
Last night, Noah succcessfully earned back access to his Bristle Blocks (now “Krinkles”)
Then he built a stack of wheels, and told me it was a “Sandwich Pppptoo-er. It pppptoos out sandwiches for you to eat! Eat this ketchup one, That Mommy!” Noah then pppptooed me 3 peanut butter sandwiches and some mustard. Something tells me I’m going to remain the cook here for a loooong time.
“Noah, do pppptooers hurt people?”
“No…they pppptoo things at you and you might fall down.”
“What are pppptooers for?”
“Pppptooing.”
A few minutes later, while coloring with markers, Noah explained to me that he was drawing a “weapon” which was a special kind of pppptooer. It was yellow, and it pppptooed circles.
This morning, Noah made a picture of a bubble pppptooer out of bubble stickers that the Easter Bunny gave him. “When you get a bubble pppptooed at you, you have to jump over it!”
So, I think there are a few concepts going on here for Noah.
When you hear the classic video game/movie “pppptoo pppptoo” sound, it comes from an object. You and I might call it a gun or a weapon, or maybe a laser. Noah doesn’t see them exactly the same way, although he may be starting to get that they are related objects.
In Noah’s world, pppptooers emanate something: bubbles, sandwiches, sounds, circles, things that might make you fall down. But they don’t seem to hurt people.
This makes me not quite ready to think of them as “toy guns” although they are probably moving in that direction.
I have a mix of feelings and opinions about the issue of toy guns, and clearer views about real guns.
Let’s tackle the easier question first: I would prefer that Noah not play in a house where there are real guns. I definitely don’t want him playing somewhere with real guns that are not locked up. I’ve read too many stories about children — mostly boys — who accidentally shoot their friends because they had no idea it was a loaded, real, gun.
When Noah gets older, if he wants to learn how to shoot in a safe, controlled environment, ie riflery at summer camp or a similar well-supervised and out-of-the-house appropriate location, I’m ok with that. I think that him knowing that guns are not toys and must be handled carefully and with respect is extremely important.
Toy guns are a more gray area.
I think a flat out ban is ineffective, much the way Covert, Reno, and other commenters observed. I think it led me to lie about having the squirt gun, not to have no interest in squirt guns.
(And by the way, my first with-a-paycheck job was for the Milwaukee Gun Club, a recreational skeet shooting establishment. I never touched a gun while I was there, but I sold ammo, cokes, and beer, and worked as a trap setter and puller. I tell this to illustrate that it also apparently didn’t drive me away from guns or “gun people.” Whatever that means.)
I think that most people, including children, are capable of making the same distinction that Noah is already making: fantasy vs reality.
Pppptooers and the myriad of toy objects that emanate things are distinguishable from guns, even if they are shaped like guns and we call them guns. Video games where the object is to shoot something or someone also use pppptooers, even if the pppptooer creates exploding things/dying things results.
As Noah gets older and starts to understand what he is “really” pretending when he plays with pppptooers, and most likely stops calling them pppptooers, I think it is important for us to be talking with him about the risks and dangers real guns present.
I expect that the mix of literature on violent video games will get some intense review as Noah gets older. Damned if I’m going to let my kid unthinkingly play a game where they get points for sleeping with a prostitute and then ripping her off or killing her — looking at you, Grand Theft Auto. But I don’t want to give those games the allure of the forbidden, either. There may be age limits, time limits, location requirements (the living room where your Moms can interrupt or worse yet play along, springs to mind), and forced tedius and embarrassing conversations with your mother before certain lines can be crossed.
And I also think that commenters Eric and Richard make excellent points — there are a lot of critically important issues that create the environment for many of the risks that guns then tip into crisis.
Jen, I think that ties into your excellent points, too. Modeling AND talking about the whole pantheon of our values is important — critical, in fact — for what we try to teach him about guns and pppptooers to make sense and to help him grow up into the kind of man we hope he will become.
So far, we haven’t tried to talk a lot about alcohol, except that when one of us has a beer or glass of wine with dinner, we tell him that they aren’t drinks for kids. We’ve let him sniff the drinks, to which he universally responds with “eeeeeeeuuuuuwwwww! YUCK!” We’ll cross the line for discussing responsible drinking when we first see a tipsy or drunk person that he might notice.
Same with cruelty, only that’s already more hands-on. We don’t allow Noah to hit or kick or otherwise hurt other people. We haven’t quite sorted out how to handle him pretending to hurt himself to get our attention — I lean towards ignoring/downplaying, Jill leans towards intervening/stopping. We model and discuss how to be gentle with Josie, where he an and can’t touch her, like not putting his fingers in her mouth, but allowing him to tickle her belly, for example.
Like Tammom said in her comments, what it comes down to is giving Noah and Josie the best tools and training we can to help them learn how to make good decisions.
Only time will tell if we’ve done a good job.
(On a sort of related note, have you seen all the articles that the US is in a dire ammo shortage, because since November 5, the second amendment fundamentalists have been buying guns and ammo at such an insane rate that police and sheriff’s departments can’t get what they need???
Does anyone else find it scary to hear that the radical fringe right wing is stockpiling weapons??? On the other hand, maybe the way to keep Noah from playing with guns is to tell him he has to pay for them himself.)
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This isn’t just radical fringe right-wingers. My husband is certain that Obama is going to manage to pass a ban on assault rifles and crack down on weapons in general. He believes in the second ammendment, and based on the election, decided it’s time to buy something that he normally would have put off until we had more money, because he doesn’t believe the opportunity will exist in the future.
Our weapons are all under lock and key. The kids have never seen them. As someone with a differing opinion on guns in the house, I ask you this (seriously because most people I talk to agree with me on the issue- that’s just the nature of friendships): What’s the best way to approach the topic with new aquaintances before playdates? Do I need to?
See, you’re not just my token lebian friend. You’re also my token anti-gun friend. Lucky you, you get all the questions. LOL.
ktjrdn- I hope you do tell new aquaintances that you are a gun owner. I think that is the responsible thing to do.
You just brought up a point that as an anti-gun person never had occured to me; Now that my son is an active mobile kid, I have to start asking my son’s friends parents if they have guns in their house.
FWIW- I would insist on playdates in a gun-free environment.
Agreed. Keys can be found. Some of those news stories about the 11-year-olds shooting the 4-year-olds involved supposedly locked guns. Kids listen and watch and remember EVERYTHING.
I love your analysis of Noah’s concepts about objects that emanate other objects. It’s like his “guns” are creators. Very sweet.
When he has the coordination to handle them, I don’t think a water squirter or a nerf rocket launcher will turn him into a cruel and insensitive person. They will annoy you, though. Because he will soak you. Out of love.
As for video games, you can stick to Wii. That’s all my brother allows in his house, and they got it when the kids were something like 10 and 12. (I’m not sure if this is the brother who actually shot Mom. It may be. I’ll have to ask.)
Katie, you crack me up! I hope you are going to BlogHer again this summer!
My bafflement on the “sudden need to buy guns & ammo” front stems mostly from political analysis. I haven’t seen anything to suggest that President Obama is going to take on any kind of gun/ammo prohibitions, certainly not early in his term, and even then, it would take time to be put in place.
As much as I might think restrictions on guns are good — I don’t think they are coming. I don’t think these fears are grounded. So why do so many gun owners have a completely different opinion that is driving them to such urgent action?
I have no real idea what the answer is.
I suspect there is some kind of fearmongering on the part of either the NRA or maybe conservative talk radio. But that is JUST A THEORY. Katie? Katie’s husband? Any opinions? What’s generating the concerns?
WRT playdates & gun ownership, I think it’s a potentially stressful and awkward conversation for pre-playdate purposes. We haven’t asked those questions, yet.
But as Noah has reached the age where he isn’t 100% monitored every moment of playtime, we probably should start having those conversations. (Like Katie, most of my friends are similar to me, so I think most of those conversations will go “guns? are you kidding? of course not! you don’t have guns, do you???”)
At this point, I think I’m still ok with locked weapons. My view might change in a house with older kids, or when Noah and his friends are older. That also may be a time for some of those serious “guns are not toys” conversations.
“Guns don’t kill people, BULLETS kill people.” — Chris Rock
My dad kept his guns locked in a gun cabinet and his bullets locked under combination in a safe.
I remember dealing with these issues; it’s really hard. We finally came to this: Play with “made up” guns but no aiming at people, no toy guns that shoot any projectiles (if they came w/projectiles they were seized), none that were “too real” and when they got to be over 4, “If you want a toy gun, save up your money and buy it for yourself.”
The thing we DID realize was that, growing up in Manhattan in the 80s, they saw and heard things. One saw a wounded bank manager being rolled out by paramedics etc. So they did need to play stuff out a little; these were rules that made that comfortable for us.
That’s very interesting that he doesn’t associate ppptooers as hurting people. Sounds like whatever you are doing in the “gun toy” department it is working well so far.
I’ve always sort of wanted to get a gun “someday” but was too lazy to learn how to use it and too cheap to spend the money. But lately I’ve felt a little more urgency about it. Needless to say, I didn’t get this concern from right-wing fearmongering or Rush Limbaugh or anything like that, because I intentionally live in a liberal bubble so that I’m never exposed to the opinions of people who disagree with me.
Rather, I think my increased concern stems from two things: (1) an increasing feeling that owning a gun may become necessary some day, coupled with (2) an increasing awareness that that most liberals (in my view) are irrationally anti-gun. Although my fear of having to take up arms against a corrupt government someday has subsided since the election of Obama, it has been balanced out by increasing concern (in significant part because of the financial crisis) that I may have to protect my family’s survival in some kind of post-apocalyptic dystopia someday. Think Cormac McCarthy rather than Joe McCarthy. That, coupled with my uncertainty about the future of our 2nd amendment rights, makes me want to get a gun sooner rather than latter.
P.S. I guess to be accurate I should say that I TRY my best to avoid people who disagree with me, which — as a practical matter — basically means avoiding conservatives. I do have to tolerate some disagreement with my fellow liberals (like on the gun issue) if I am to have any kind of social network. So I just realized that it is possible that I overestimate the threat to the second amendment issue as a result. In other words maybe I’m “left-wing fearmongering” because it’s one of the few areas in which I actually have to engage people with whom I disagree.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/21/forgotten.gun/index.html
This is pretty much why I wouldn’t have guns in my home… or want my son in a home where there were guns. Accidents happen.