When I was a kid, there were Cops and Robbers or Cowboys and Indians or Good Guys and Bad Guys. It is like life and death, yin and yang or life in general where there is an opposition of two things. The dark side versus good is an age old concept that has been around hundreds of years, whether in children’s games or the real life of adults.
So today I read that the Hayward School District here in state of California is doing a gun buyback program for toy guns at an elementary school. Turn in your gun and get a book and a raffle ticket. Will they accept the pop tart that was eaten into a form like a gun that caused an elementary school child to get sent home from school? How about the hand of the child the made the form of a gun and was punished as well. Then there was the elementary school child that took his cap gun to school and got suspended for several days. When is this going to end?
It will never end. As a child, many of our guns were made out of an old piece of pine that was cut into the shape of a rifle of pistol. Cap guns were also cool. You have to love the smell of the smoke from the cap gun. It brings a sensory pleasure that no air soft wanabe could ever reproduce.
So back to the question, what happened to the children’s parents? My kids had squirt guns, cap pistols and even an occasional pistol out of pine. As a child, there was nothing like drawing out your proposed firearm and then cutting it out with the scroll saw under the watchful eye of dad. I guess parents would rather have their child sit in a corner and read a book than go out into the neighborhood and run around like evil chasing good or good chasing evil. What may really be the evil in all this is our children’s loss of imagination and the gain of childhood obesity. That is what happened to children’s parents.
