Kids with toy guns outside my window
I'm sitting here at work listening to 10-12 year old boys play fight with silver 9mm replica toy guns. When I was a kid I watched old western tv shows and had lots of fun playing with cap guns. Maybe I'm getting old, maybe I have a bias against the ghetto version of the Wild West. But somehow it just seems more jarring in a neighborhood that reported 175 gunshot victims between ages 7 and 24 in 2006.
2 comments:
In a Swazi slum, outside the Manzini city dump, children were "playing sex" with each other. In a community with 99% HIV rate, kids were modelling the most consistent adult behaviour they saw.
Makes your role all the more important, when kids either see or hear about violence all the time.
A difficult issue, given that we don’t want to cut off a child’s imagination or opportunity to pretend. Truth is that so many of our childhood games were politically incorrect or represented willful violations of the law: cowboys and Indians (pc?), exploring unknown territory (trespassing), cops and robbers (theft and disrespect to authority), in short we did a lot of stuff as kids that if carried out into adulthood would land us in a heap of trouble. The issue is one of who are those individuals that will teach a child the difference between imaginary play and acceptable behavior.
Growing up I remember playing the video game CONTRA…somehow I understood that it was not cool for me to go into the jungle and start shooting people with machine guns.
Just a thought.
Lee
http://philosepher.blogspot.com
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