Toy Guns 07 367 Ns - article by Whimsical Wire Articles

Little boys seem to like war. Granted, big boys like guns and war as well, though most of them are considerably less fond of it once they realize that (1) war kills people and (2) once you’re dead you can’t get up five or ten seconds later and become alive again. As a kid I definitely knew about #1, but I wasn’t quite so sure about #2. At the time I guess it didn’t matter much.

I didn’t have many toy guns as a kid. Though my parents weren’t real outspoken about my having toy guns, I’m pretty sure they didn’t like the idea much. So when I was home I was usually more of the LEGO or Lincoln Log type. However, my friends sure had toy guns. In fact, some of them had a lot of toy guns. So whenever I spent time at their houses we’d usually spend a considerable amount of time playing with G.I. Joes and their guns or our own, child-sized toy guns. Depending on how many of us were gathered at any one time, our games involving toy guns changed quite a bit. We staged huge, world-war one style firefights and trench battles. We ran secret spy missions into enemy territory and covert-ops battles under the cover of darkness. We fought in the woods and in open fields, slaughtering each other every few minutes. If you got killed you had to stay on the ground for awhile, but eventually you could get up as somebody else and rejoin the fight. The armies in the movies and on TV always got reinforcements, so we figured that we needed them as well.

Though all of this playing with toy guns probably didn’t permanently scar me, I doubt that it did me a lot of good. Like Barbie dolls, toy guns are still a hugely gender-specific toy. Though many parents wouldn’t think anything is wrong with young boys playing war, I wonder what they would think of their young daughters as Amazon-ian warriors, blazing into battle with their peers. I’m thinking that they would get worried a lot sooner.

A lot of research has gone into gender-biased toys and activities, and most researchers agree that it really doesn’t do us a lot of good down the road. The healthiest people and relationships are often the most androgynous, with men doing their share of cooking while women aren’t afraid to hang the occasional picture frame. This, combined with the fact that it’s tough to justify glamorizing war, makes it tough to make a solid case for putting toy guns into the hands of our children.

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