My 25 mo old ds has had no exposure to seeing guns used (he sees real guns at my father's house, but hasn't seen them held or used in any way) but he figured out how to attach his plastic wrench to the plastic screwdriver to make a gun shape. He points this at people, animals, objects and pretends to do something. I don't know what he's pretending. My cultural assumptions about guns mean nothing to him. I think that even in cultures w/o guns, a child would do this. He is interacting with his environment through this toy. I don't know how he's interacting with it, as it's mostly in his imagination and he's not very talkative about his imagination yet.
Try not to let your cultural assumptions color his play artificially.
That being said, when my brother and I were little, we were raised around guns, both toy and real. It was a VERY STRICT rule in our house that no toy or imaginary gun, no gun made from PBJ sandwiches or our own fingers were to EVER be pointed at anything alive. EVER. Even during 'Cops & Robbers' games or 'War' games. Our action figures could point guns at each other, but no action figure could point at a real living creature. This was so serious that to this day whenever a child makes a gun of his fingers and points it at me I want to snap a gasquet and yell at him/her.
YOU DO NOT POINT FAKE GUNS AT LIVING CREATURES!! EVER!!
This is so ingrained in my personality because we had real guns in the house with real bullets. By the time my brother and I were 10, we knew how to fire and handle real guns. My father had us very well prepared to act responsibly with them b/c of the ingrained behavior about toy guns. We both shepherded our friends when they were at our houses and never trusted any friend who would touch a gun that was laying out. Some people may say it was irresponsible to have guns around us at all, but if you had known us as children, you would know we would sooner beat each other bloody with sticks and rocks or even sooner steal a car! than even point our fake guns at each other, and certainly NEVER a real gun.
What happens when your child is 8 and goes to a friend's house and they have a gun out? You can't control your child's experiences forever. They need to know how to handle themselves and react logically and safely in such a situation.
Ignoring the issue and sheltering us from guns would not have protected us and would not have taught us anything.
And for the us vs. them violence idea...we were raised with the idea that guns are for self-defense and recreation (hunting as appropriate, target shooting, collecting). When defending oneself, it is us vs. them in a very intimate and real sense. This is not wrong, it is real. Reality isn't wrong or right, good or evil. I choose my life over the life of this person threatening me/my family. I wouldn't make a very good pacifist.
My point when I started this post was just to say that 'gun' play is normal, whether the culture has guns in it or not. But you do need to give him guidelines about what is acceptable conduct during gun play. No pointing at living creatures is the most important rule.
Try not to let your cultural assumptions color his play artificially.
That being said, when my brother and I were little, we were raised around guns, both toy and real. It was a VERY STRICT rule in our house that no toy or imaginary gun, no gun made from PBJ sandwiches or our own fingers were to EVER be pointed at anything alive. EVER. Even during 'Cops & Robbers' games or 'War' games. Our action figures could point guns at each other, but no action figure could point at a real living creature. This was so serious that to this day whenever a child makes a gun of his fingers and points it at me I want to snap a gasquet and yell at him/her.
YOU DO NOT POINT FAKE GUNS AT LIVING CREATURES!! EVER!!
This is so ingrained in my personality because we had real guns in the house with real bullets. By the time my brother and I were 10, we knew how to fire and handle real guns. My father had us very well prepared to act responsibly with them b/c of the ingrained behavior about toy guns. We both shepherded our friends when they were at our houses and never trusted any friend who would touch a gun that was laying out. Some people may say it was irresponsible to have guns around us at all, but if you had known us as children, you would know we would sooner beat each other bloody with sticks and rocks or even sooner steal a car! than even point our fake guns at each other, and certainly NEVER a real gun.
What happens when your child is 8 and goes to a friend's house and they have a gun out? You can't control your child's experiences forever. They need to know how to handle themselves and react logically and safely in such a situation.
Ignoring the issue and sheltering us from guns would not have protected us and would not have taught us anything.
And for the us vs. them violence idea...we were raised with the idea that guns are for self-defense and recreation (hunting as appropriate, target shooting, collecting). When defending oneself, it is us vs. them in a very intimate and real sense. This is not wrong, it is real. Reality isn't wrong or right, good or evil. I choose my life over the life of this person threatening me/my family. I wouldn't make a very good pacifist.
My point when I started this post was just to say that 'gun' play is normal, whether the culture has guns in it or not. But you do need to give him guidelines about what is acceptable conduct during gun play. No pointing at living creatures is the most important rule.
:
) in college a couple of years ago and they were talking about what they wanted to be 'when they grew up'. My friend is very much NOT the steriotypical housewife from the 50's, very much in the feminist category, and yet she's always wanted to get married and have a couple of kids. She wasn't told outright that she had to stop coming to the group, but they made it pretty clear that it wasn't a place for future wives and moms.
