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Disarming Childhood - FAJournal 210
13 years ago
When was the last time you saw a bunch of kids – mostly boys – playing with toy guns? I don’t mean huge, parti-coloured water cannons that look like a lewd circus clown’s penis, but toy guns that are supposed to look like guns.
Set the clock back to 1962. At the age of 11, I had enough toy guns to arm a platoon. I had a Daisy air rifle that made a huge bang, and cocked with a realistic lever action just like the famous Winchester Rifles of the 1880s. I had a replica musket from the American civil war, bought at a tourist trap in Gettysburg itself, during the centennial. It had a removable rubber bayonet, real wood stocks and a working lock and trigger mechanism. You could place a cap on the pan for real action! I had a die-cast metal Luger that was very realistic looking, though scaled to a child’s hand rather than that of an adult SS Obergruppensfuhrer. The cocking action disguised a hatch to load a roll of caps. I had any number of Colt Peacemakers, the epitome of all “cowboy guns.” Another of my many toy guns was a small water pistol. It resembled a magazine-loaded Thompson, except that it lacked a shoulder stock. I imagined it was a hand weapon that actually fired like a machine gun. It was an idea whose time in reality hadn’t yet come… but would.
One of my prize possessions was indicative of the times. President Kennedy had been a huge fan of Ian Fleming’s spy novels, kicking off a fad in men’s reading. Sean Connery exploded onto the silver screen as 007. The boob tube, meanwhile, spun off imitation spies as readily as it had previously given us wacky housewives, wooden police detectives and rugged looking brain surgeons. I had a James Bond briefcase with any number of gizmos inside, and a secret way to unlock it. By pressing a trigger hidden in the handle you could fire a rubber bullet almost halfway across the living room and scare the cat! Another piece of indispensable espionage equipment I owned was a camera that snapped into a pistol at the touch of a hidden button.
My favourite gun of all, though, was one I never owned. My friend Mark had one of the fabulous Marx Company Thompson M-1 submachine guns. It was molded faithfully in jungle green, had adjustable rear sights and was almost life-size. A realistic cocking handle on the right side drew back a spring loaded ratchet. Pulling the trigger released the mechanism, making a raucous noise any kid with an active imagination could easily believe was automatic fire. Mark never let me use it … driving me to a lifelong quest for The Perfect Toy Gun.
I never really found it. Not while I was still of an age to actually play with it, anyway.
From the late 1960s, though, there was mounting pressure on toy makers to stop manufacture realistic toy guns … or, indeed, any toy guns at all. After all, playing with guns taught children that killing “Injuns” and “spies” was good. Concerned parents imagined that children who grew up playing “war” would become hardened to taking life, grow up into warmongers and become canon-fodder for far-flung foreign conflicts. Conversely, if shielded from any such negativity, little boys would grow up to be… I dunno… women? Hippies? Incapable of even thinking about violence, at any rate.
For an entire decade, it was all but impossible to buy your sons (or daughters) a toy rifle or pistol that wasn’t bright green or orange and filled from the water tap.
It was irresponsible, wholesale manipulation of a generation.
Ronald Reagan was a big step backward for America in almost all ways, except in this: it became acceptable to arm your children once again. There was a brief resurgence of toy guns, but the main source was the wave of imports from the Pacific Rim. Cheap imitations of the once-glorious Marx toys flooded dollar stores. Once again, the aisles of Toys-R-Us were stocked with Daisy air rifles. I found creditable Peacemakers, Lugers, flintlocks, Browning Automatics and 9mm Berettas. Gamers re-fought WWII and the Vietnam war. G.I. Joe was reborn, meaner and more authentic than ever.
Nevertheless, the damage had been done. You could find the toy guns, but the PACs and legislators had left their mark on them – by law, any replica of a firearm intended for children’s play, or that might possibly fall into the hands of children, had to have a bright orange or red plastic cover blocking the muzzle. Perfectly respectable-looking Smith & Wesson .38 revolvers that I might have been proud to own were ruined by an orange bottle cap glued over the business end! I learned that you could generally break it off, but the results sometimes left a lot to be desired. A file, sandpaper and infinite patience helped only so much.
It was clear who war toys like G.I. Joe and diecast scale model tanks were aimed at. Only adults could pull out their wallets, or their credit cards, to meet the sticker price.
Almost as quickly as the Renaissance of toy guns blossomed, it withered and died again. The rebirth of G.I. Joe and all other military oriented playthings vanished along with the Star Trek Phasers and concealed spy weapons, leaving kids nothing better than wimpy old light sabers with which to work off their aggressions. Perhaps it was thought that cutting people up with laser beams was too far-fetched to be a bad influence?
Where has this 40-year old persecution of toy guns gotten us, you may ask? Is contemporary society violence-free? Have we become emasculated flower-children, garbed in flowing, brightly coloured robes and dancing in rings while NRA chapters close nationwide?
Hardly. A moment’s thought about Dick Cheney or Anders Behring Breivik puts the lie to any such delusion. Children no longer play “cops an’ robbers” in the streets, it’s true. Why should they? In major urban centers they play with real guns, competing for turf with other kid gangs – gangs with names like Bloods and Crips. Ordinary Okies drive trucks full of fertilizer-derived explosives up to government buildings, with day-care centers on the ground floor, to detonate their cargo. Drive-by shooters pistol school children. Neighborhood Watch members shoot on sight. A week hardly goes by without a synagogue, church or mosque blown up. Ice hockey is more violent than ever.
As if all that weren’t terrifying enough, have children ever actually been sheltered from violence, or do they simply role-play the parts of gangstas, mercenaries and barbarian warriors in another way? Before you answer, I suggest you check your children’s video game library… It is highly unusual for children past the age of 6 to only play only games such as “Barney Makes a Friend” or “The Smurf’s Smurfiest Adventure.” By the age of five, most children gravitate to games with words like “blood,” “kill,” “war,” or “murder” in the title – the age when, at one time, they put their teddy bears aside and strapped on a Roy Rogers belt and six-guns.
Meanwhile, the pressure on toy guns only increases. Police Departments pressure city councils to outlaw them altogether. In the media, cases appear on a regular basis of police officers thrown into a panic by some child with a vaguely realistic revolver – that is, one without a clown face – or an M-16 only 16 inches long. Now and then the cops shoot first and ask later – excusing themselves by telling the six-o’clock news that they couldn’t take the chance the kid might have been packing Pop’s real handgun. (As though we didn’t pay them well to take chances, and not just shoot anyone in the general public who makes them nervous.)
Even Airsoft guns are under attack. They can look fairly real but are made of plastic and shoot only plastic BBs. They are clearly meant for adults, and have the hated orange muzzle tips… but no matter. Banned outright in many municipalities are the costly, realistic replicas, with working parts that are also patently aimed at adult collectors. Adult kids are apparently not to be allowed toy guns either. The cops claim to be worried that realistic but non-functional handguns might be used in robberries. So they might… but would it better if criminals had, perforce, to rob convenience stores with real guns?
Nice going, concerned Mothers! Good call, sensitive Fathers! A special round of applause for Officers looking after the public interest! In my day, we shot up make-believe ethnic minorities and persecuted pretend criminal elements with gleeful abandon, and the full authority of our imaginations. But I never saw another kid do any greater violence to another than a knuckle sandwich. Nobody carried a 2-inch pen knife … let alone a 9mm Glock. School bullies wouldn’t beat you to death under a bridge. Hockey players weren’t brought on charges of assault and manslaughter.
If we tried, one wonders how many more improvements we might make to the human psyche?
I did find the perfect toy gun eventually… but that’s a story for another day.
Set the clock back to 1962. At the age of 11, I had enough toy guns to arm a platoon. I had a Daisy air rifle that made a huge bang, and cocked with a realistic lever action just like the famous Winchester Rifles of the 1880s. I had a replica musket from the American civil war, bought at a tourist trap in Gettysburg itself, during the centennial. It had a removable rubber bayonet, real wood stocks and a working lock and trigger mechanism. You could place a cap on the pan for real action! I had a die-cast metal Luger that was very realistic looking, though scaled to a child’s hand rather than that of an adult SS Obergruppensfuhrer. The cocking action disguised a hatch to load a roll of caps. I had any number of Colt Peacemakers, the epitome of all “cowboy guns.” Another of my many toy guns was a small water pistol. It resembled a magazine-loaded Thompson, except that it lacked a shoulder stock. I imagined it was a hand weapon that actually fired like a machine gun. It was an idea whose time in reality hadn’t yet come… but would.
One of my prize possessions was indicative of the times. President Kennedy had been a huge fan of Ian Fleming’s spy novels, kicking off a fad in men’s reading. Sean Connery exploded onto the silver screen as 007. The boob tube, meanwhile, spun off imitation spies as readily as it had previously given us wacky housewives, wooden police detectives and rugged looking brain surgeons. I had a James Bond briefcase with any number of gizmos inside, and a secret way to unlock it. By pressing a trigger hidden in the handle you could fire a rubber bullet almost halfway across the living room and scare the cat! Another piece of indispensable espionage equipment I owned was a camera that snapped into a pistol at the touch of a hidden button.
My favourite gun of all, though, was one I never owned. My friend Mark had one of the fabulous Marx Company Thompson M-1 submachine guns. It was molded faithfully in jungle green, had adjustable rear sights and was almost life-size. A realistic cocking handle on the right side drew back a spring loaded ratchet. Pulling the trigger released the mechanism, making a raucous noise any kid with an active imagination could easily believe was automatic fire. Mark never let me use it … driving me to a lifelong quest for The Perfect Toy Gun.
I never really found it. Not while I was still of an age to actually play with it, anyway.
From the late 1960s, though, there was mounting pressure on toy makers to stop manufacture realistic toy guns … or, indeed, any toy guns at all. After all, playing with guns taught children that killing “Injuns” and “spies” was good. Concerned parents imagined that children who grew up playing “war” would become hardened to taking life, grow up into warmongers and become canon-fodder for far-flung foreign conflicts. Conversely, if shielded from any such negativity, little boys would grow up to be… I dunno… women? Hippies? Incapable of even thinking about violence, at any rate.
For an entire decade, it was all but impossible to buy your sons (or daughters) a toy rifle or pistol that wasn’t bright green or orange and filled from the water tap.
It was irresponsible, wholesale manipulation of a generation.
Ronald Reagan was a big step backward for America in almost all ways, except in this: it became acceptable to arm your children once again. There was a brief resurgence of toy guns, but the main source was the wave of imports from the Pacific Rim. Cheap imitations of the once-glorious Marx toys flooded dollar stores. Once again, the aisles of Toys-R-Us were stocked with Daisy air rifles. I found creditable Peacemakers, Lugers, flintlocks, Browning Automatics and 9mm Berettas. Gamers re-fought WWII and the Vietnam war. G.I. Joe was reborn, meaner and more authentic than ever.
Nevertheless, the damage had been done. You could find the toy guns, but the PACs and legislators had left their mark on them – by law, any replica of a firearm intended for children’s play, or that might possibly fall into the hands of children, had to have a bright orange or red plastic cover blocking the muzzle. Perfectly respectable-looking Smith & Wesson .38 revolvers that I might have been proud to own were ruined by an orange bottle cap glued over the business end! I learned that you could generally break it off, but the results sometimes left a lot to be desired. A file, sandpaper and infinite patience helped only so much.
It was clear who war toys like G.I. Joe and diecast scale model tanks were aimed at. Only adults could pull out their wallets, or their credit cards, to meet the sticker price.
Almost as quickly as the Renaissance of toy guns blossomed, it withered and died again. The rebirth of G.I. Joe and all other military oriented playthings vanished along with the Star Trek Phasers and concealed spy weapons, leaving kids nothing better than wimpy old light sabers with which to work off their aggressions. Perhaps it was thought that cutting people up with laser beams was too far-fetched to be a bad influence?
Where has this 40-year old persecution of toy guns gotten us, you may ask? Is contemporary society violence-free? Have we become emasculated flower-children, garbed in flowing, brightly coloured robes and dancing in rings while NRA chapters close nationwide?
Hardly. A moment’s thought about Dick Cheney or Anders Behring Breivik puts the lie to any such delusion. Children no longer play “cops an’ robbers” in the streets, it’s true. Why should they? In major urban centers they play with real guns, competing for turf with other kid gangs – gangs with names like Bloods and Crips. Ordinary Okies drive trucks full of fertilizer-derived explosives up to government buildings, with day-care centers on the ground floor, to detonate their cargo. Drive-by shooters pistol school children. Neighborhood Watch members shoot on sight. A week hardly goes by without a synagogue, church or mosque blown up. Ice hockey is more violent than ever.
As if all that weren’t terrifying enough, have children ever actually been sheltered from violence, or do they simply role-play the parts of gangstas, mercenaries and barbarian warriors in another way? Before you answer, I suggest you check your children’s video game library… It is highly unusual for children past the age of 6 to only play only games such as “Barney Makes a Friend” or “The Smurf’s Smurfiest Adventure.” By the age of five, most children gravitate to games with words like “blood,” “kill,” “war,” or “murder” in the title – the age when, at one time, they put their teddy bears aside and strapped on a Roy Rogers belt and six-guns.
Meanwhile, the pressure on toy guns only increases. Police Departments pressure city councils to outlaw them altogether. In the media, cases appear on a regular basis of police officers thrown into a panic by some child with a vaguely realistic revolver – that is, one without a clown face – or an M-16 only 16 inches long. Now and then the cops shoot first and ask later – excusing themselves by telling the six-o’clock news that they couldn’t take the chance the kid might have been packing Pop’s real handgun. (As though we didn’t pay them well to take chances, and not just shoot anyone in the general public who makes them nervous.)
Even Airsoft guns are under attack. They can look fairly real but are made of plastic and shoot only plastic BBs. They are clearly meant for adults, and have the hated orange muzzle tips… but no matter. Banned outright in many municipalities are the costly, realistic replicas, with working parts that are also patently aimed at adult collectors. Adult kids are apparently not to be allowed toy guns either. The cops claim to be worried that realistic but non-functional handguns might be used in robberries. So they might… but would it better if criminals had, perforce, to rob convenience stores with real guns?
Nice going, concerned Mothers! Good call, sensitive Fathers! A special round of applause for Officers looking after the public interest! In my day, we shot up make-believe ethnic minorities and persecuted pretend criminal elements with gleeful abandon, and the full authority of our imaginations. But I never saw another kid do any greater violence to another than a knuckle sandwich. Nobody carried a 2-inch pen knife … let alone a 9mm Glock. School bullies wouldn’t beat you to death under a bridge. Hockey players weren’t brought on charges of assault and manslaughter.
If we tried, one wonders how many more improvements we might make to the human psyche?
I did find the perfect toy gun eventually… but that’s a story for another day.
She went nuts.
She was young enough to be around when the first model was on sale, but her dad refused to buy it for her.
sometimes the population actually puts those who want to make the world better into a vilified position. There's nothing wrong with owning a toy gun, and people shouldn't be quick to jump on the "anti-violence" bandwagon. There's going to be violence for as long as the human race survives, over the most trivial of details. Sex, Color, Age, Ethnicity... It's not our fault that these things continue. but it is the fault of those who think destroying something that has no relation to the problem at hand solves the problem.
Summed Up: We all have an Opinion. But those who join under an opinion are the ones who cause the most damage.
also, more and more parents ceasing to teach their children well and make them think for themselves, and instead leaving it to overworked teachers and the rest of society. instead they try hardest to be politically correct, while there ain't such thing as beign politically correct. it's just a term describing the desire to worry someone else's head... and that makes them so busy they forget about their most pressing tasks at hand: creating a humane human.
I can understand if cops are afraid to catch a bullet and rather not taking chances seeing something looking realistic. after all, some artists can paint them realistic enough so you'd have to look closer. but, those who point that at a group of nervous cops with their guns ready shan't complain about beign weighted down with lead. it's like asking for it.
good-looking toy guns have become rare in germany. still it doesn'tprevent those who are hell-bent ion running amok from purchasing somethign dangerous, or simply stealing their naive daddy's gun and hundreds of rounds to refill.
(Erfurth: teenager buys front-loader handguns from the internet, along with bullets and the means to create his own black powder. everything was unprohibited. Winnenden: Teenager steals handgun from his dad who left the locker unlocked, grabs boxes of ammo, and goes to business. did prohibiting toy guns and real guns prevent any of this? no.)
interesting thing is that they always blame "killer-games" for it. yes, some actually do play them, but the home version does nothign to teach real-life aiming, as studies have proven. aside that, a legiopn of people play them without ever thinking about actually hurting someone.
after the Winnenden incident they made a big show of talking opeople into donating their "killer-game"-CDs for destruction. they rented a 40'-thrash container and waited for the outcome. in the end they got three(!) CDs, of which every one was a copy either, and cut the footage into letting it look like they got thousands of them. actually what TV saw was a load of cheap unburned CDs... not a single original was donated ever.
meanwhile, the guy who organized all this, was on the verge of private bankruptcy before the run. and now? he's made for life. who woulda'thunk, hm?
meanwhile, german gov does nothign to actually prohibit "killer games" at all. first, they need the sales tax. second, it would change nothing. third, they need scapegoats.
While I understand a cops reluctance to take chances, it's what I -- as a taxpayer -- pay him to do. He's less likely to be shot by some kid with a gun -- that *might* be real -- than he is by a bank robber, whose gun nobody doubts is real. A cop accepts the risk of one and ought to accept the risk of the other as well. If he doesn't like it, it may be best he find a different line of work.
All the same, anyone from 12 up who carries a realistic looking gun in public is asking for some kind of trouble. You should know better. A five year old doesn't -- and if he actually has got Pop's handgun, I expect cops to risk their own necks to get it off the kid without shooting him. It's their job.
bodyguards usually are willing to take the bullet, because that's what they're paid for. the good ones deescalate before bullets are flying or make sure it isn't necessary to take a bullet in the first place.
the average cop ain't that tough, I can understand that. but still, as you say, it's part of the risk of their job.
then there is that atmosphere of being afraid of everybody, and I would like to know what causes it really. one can blame the medias, but that's only part of the problem. also, it seems to be a local problem. you only hear from shootouts and innocents killed by those supposed to protect them from certain areas.
this happens since the 80's, right under the nose of the powers that be. and since then they are too politically correct to do anything, much less recognize the problem: if immigrants turn your city into their hometown it's time to either force them to integrate into your culture, or send them back to there they came from.
instead of forcing refugees from former yougoslavia out which ARE fully integrated and would face poverty and violence back home.
I feel that the efforts of Turkey to join the EU are misplaced. As I understand it, it would be an open door to Turks to come and go in Europe as they please, practically. While not exactly the Turkish conquest envisioned by Suleman the Great, it would be bad enough to have a sizable minority who feel they're entitled to settle in other people's homes without leaving a single thing behind.
Of course, there's the other side of the coin. If you were to settle in Turkey for several years, you might have to accept that your kid is going to go to school there and have t learn the lingo. If it were Egypt or China, heave forbid, you might find some greed-crazed Maoist or disapproving Muslim coming home from school after a while. I guess if that's a problem, don't move to really foreign countries while raising a family.
and here we have the main problem: the parents can get away with pidgin german most of the times, if they speak german at all. but then their kids go to school and are confronted with language and culture completely alien to them because their parents never cared. the kids would, though, and are usually quick to pick it up, if you let them. but teachers don't have the time trying to calm down a first class full of 6-year-olds. so they blame the parents, which blame back, backed up by politicians who fail to acknowledge that their politics failed.
I don't know if turqey would fit into the EU or not. they still have humanitarian issues, be it with their christian minority, or more important, with their kurdish minority. from their mentality in general they are probably more "europpean" than any other kaucasian country wanting in because of the benefits. I think many turqs think they won't fit in themselves; Angela Merkels half-assed efforts didn't help either. is she "yes" or "no" now? you can never tell... but not getting important things done is part of our politics.
one of the main complaints about german immigration politics is indeed, that if you move into a different country they can rightfully expect you to learn the language and respect their culture. in germany you're free to do waht you want. and they'll feed you, too.
The problem with controlling guns is the same problem with controlling immigration, alcohol, or many other things. The tighter the control, the less control one has. Sort of like the more you press down on things you don't approve of, the more they'll squish out the sides and make a bigger mess. Oddly enough, I think the best way to control guns, both toy and real, is to let people have the doggone things if they want them, but to require a permit first, sort of like earning a diploma that states you've learned how to handle a gun safely or getting a driver's license. Of course, it's not perfect as accidents, absent-mindedness, and stupidity will happen, but that's no different from how things are now. As for the police, let them complain. They still need to be kept accountable for their actions instead of getting away with treating everyone as criminals.
Slight difference that the Media has been loath to admit. It was more a case of "Shoot after being decked, with the guy sitting on your chest trying to bash your brains out on the sidewalk, while shouting "You got a problem with me?" and "You're gonna die tonight."" If there's a justified time to shoot someone, I'd say that situation probably qualifies.
ABC uses a degraded version of a video tape to hide the injuries, and NBC edits the tape of the 911 call to try to change Zimmerman's intent (They apologized for it, but not nearly as loudly as they trumpeted their original story). You get Jackson and Sharpton and the New Black Panther party trying to start up lynch mobs and call it "Justice". It should be enough to make anyone raise their eyebrow and wonder if they're being manipulated.
Despite being less violent in other ways, in one way my childhood did seem more violent than the present. Kid's were expected to fight. They didn't do it very scientifically, and rarely was anyone hurt worse than a loose tooth. But "boys will be boys." A generation before my childhood, grown men were expected to be involved in fistfights now and then -- not necessarily bar brawls, but some guy is lewd to your wife so you had a duty to deck him.
For the record, family lore has it that I was potty-trained at gunpoint (i.e. I wasn't allowed to play with my Johnny Thunder lever action rifle unless I used the commode)...
http://blogonomicon.blogspot.com/20.....ver-rifle.html
http://www.moviereplicars.net/searc.....?search=Elvira
I'm working on creating a collector's database with ym collection of ford-related model cars. but it looks like a LOT of work, though...
Airsoft guns look a lot like real guns. I think the one I have is all black without that orange tip on the end.