I never stopped my, or anyone else's children from going "bang, bang" and using any and all sorts of substitutes for weapons. It would have been like herding cats. But that doesn't mean I never attempted to censor their play regarding weapons. I did all the time. I made damn sure they heard from me, over and over, what guns REALLY were, and what guns REALLY did to people when they were fired at them. Dolls and doll clothes don't kill people and animals, so the suggestion that are somehow equatable is absurd. So is the suggestion that children of all ages can tell the difference between "know the difference between pretended and real violence." Children of all ages CANNOT make those distinctions, yet they often have access to weapons in their homes. Even those who can tell the difference between pretend and real, may not have the impulse control not to shoot a weapon when they get their hands on them. Your arguments strike me as dangerously naive.

What I was able to accomplish by forbidding gun play in my home was a number of things. First, when the kids played "bang, bang you're dead" they weren't doing it with toys that look like the real thing. A stick cannot shoot bullets, and so there was a disconnect between reality and play when they had to "make believe". I was also able to communicate my personal values, while giving a gun safety lesson at the same time. That lesson about guns, which is rarely presented to children, is this:

Real guns are made for one reason only: to kill people and animals. When they are fired at people or animals, the person/animal being shot at will get hurt or die.

A small child in a friend's neighborhood was killed some years back with a BB gun shot point blank into her chest by another child, who had been given the gun as a gift by his parents. There were a gang of kids present who said the boy was mad at the girl, and that he shot her to scare her.

At the end of the last school year here where we live, a three year old cousin of a family was staying in their home, and accidentally killed a neighborhood child who had come into the house to wait for the older kids to walk to school with him (the child killed was a nine year old). The 3 year old had taken a revolver out of the jacket pocket of a teenage boy who lived in the house, who later said he was "only holding onto the gun for a friend".

That shit really does happen. If you haven't taught your kids that that specific shit really does happen, then you aren't doing your job as a parent. Rather, you are doing what is convenient for you, which is to pretend that there is no direct correlation between toy guns and real guns, that children can't always make the distinction between reality and play, and that even if they can, not all children will control the impulse to point a gun at someone and pull the trigger.

I would suggest parents are missing a big part of what it means to be a responsible parent in this day and age, considering how awash US society is with guns, and how many kids are killed by them every year. They are everywhere. Gun violence is the number one cause of death of black males between the ages of 15 and 24. Statistics vary widely, depending on who is citing them, but the CDC tells us that gun shots are the number four cause of accidental deaths in children ages 5-14. Approximately 15 youth die each day in this country from gunshots--either accidental, suicide, or homicide.

You are seriously deluding yourself if you don't think weapons violence is a reality for kids today, and if you don't realize how much more pervasive it is today than it was when we were kids.

Sure, you can