Guns for Ice Cream

"Look, kids, we brought plastic chains for you to wear when you turn in your plastic guns!"

Hey, if they want to teach them, then teach them right.

Since when does a noise-making plastic toy teach kids to aim?

Personally, I want all thugs, criminals, and gang members to "aim" just like little kids do when they play with toy guns.

you all laugh, but I did the same thing with my kids.
I also took away their toy cars, because I don't want them to learning unsafe driving habits.
also, my children do NOT play unsupervised with any sort of lego's, blocks or lincoln logs. the last thing we need is to teach them it's "ok" to build unsafe, poorly built homes which could kill someone.
I made the mistake of letting them have a set of play pots, pans and dishes. to my unmutigated horror, I watch my daughter pour pretend milk, orange juice, and pretend baking powder into a pan, then served it to her brother and called it "soup". soup? who was she kidding? the cooking toys were confisgated that minute.
if we can't expect our children to act like responsible adults without us parents having to actually take the time to be parents, what's the point? I don't have time to teach my children about right and wrong. it's much easier to simply remove any and all temptation to behave like irrresponsible children.
I'm not a tyrant. they are aloud to play perfectly safe games, ones that prepare them for the real world. some of their favorites:
"sitting in traffic!"
"have that report to me by five!"
"let's pay the bills!!"
I find this "hands off" view at parenting exceedingly refreshing. gone is the need to teach them the proper way to do things. after all, children are our future.

supra, we need to talk about your TPS reports.

supra, we need to talk about your TPS reports.

Click to expand...

THEY'LL BE IN BY FIVE!!!!

Better cut off their index fingers and thumbs, too...

Good one, Supra!
zoom6zoom, have you been reading Farnham's Freehold again?

The people who wrote that commercial (for DiTech loans I believe) that says "People are smart" obviously never ran into this bunch.

Good point, supra.

I don't ever buy my kids toy guns, though, because I want them to learn to respect guns. I've seen too many people treat guns lke toys as adults. If they have any toy guns (like ones the neighbor's kids brought over), I make them observe proper safety rules with them. It may or may not be totally unnecessary and unhelpful, but it's what I do.

let kids be kids

kids know that toy guns don't kill.
They are learning , through play, that good conquers evil and other important life stuff.
Making them follow gun safety rules with toys is a joy killer.

I bet most of todays adults that do not understand safety rules (like the SF cop)
WERE NOT allowed toy guns.

This whole anti toy gun movement is a bunch of anti kid liberal hogwash.

from a thread long ago

#67
http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=257375&highlight=boys&page=3

I say let kids be kids, let them play with toy guns it is how they learn that good conquers evil.
preventing them from playing (yes including pointing at each other) is just the kind of liberal hogwash that turned the Columbine killers into the columbine killers.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ 'Boys will be boys so let them play war games with toy guns' By Tony Halpin, Education Editor FOR more than three decades earnest staff in nurseries and primary schools have banned boys from acting out war games and superhero fantasies in the playground wielding pretend guns and swords. But experts at a conference in London today will be told that that approach is a mistake. Boys and girls should be allowed to play their violent games and may even suffer harm if they cannot. Penny Holland, senior lecturer in early childhood studies at London Metropolitan University, says that boys have fallen victim to a politically correct dogma that is ignoring their need for boisterous rough-and-tumble play. Some become disruptive and live up to a "bad boy" image because they have been told off constantly for playing in a way that nursery staff and teachers, most of whom are female, regard as unacceptable. A new book by Ms Holland, We Don?t Play with Guns Here, urges early-years centres to reconsider the ban on "war, weapon, and superhero play", arguing that boys will be boys. There is said to be no evidence of a decline in their desire to play violent games despite 30 years of official disapproval. Boys continued to play behind the backs of staff, even when they had been told it was wrong. "It is very much part of them making sense of the world. It relates to timeless themes of the struggle between good and evil," she told The Times. "It seems to represent a developmental need to play with these things and my feeling is that it is counter-productive to work against that. You can see in some situations, where there has been rigorous enforcement of zero tolerance, that it marginalises these children because their interests are so squarely rejected. If they are constantly receiving negative responses to their play interests, with people saying ?No, we don?t play with guns here?, they absorb the sense that they are bad boys. They seek negative attention and it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle." Ms Holland said that the zero-tolerance approach had emerged from pacifist and feminist movements in the 1960s and 1970s that assumed that "the spiral of male violence" could be broken by preventing boys from playing aggressive games. But there was no evidence that boys were more or less likely to grow into aggressive men because of the games they played. Her book observes that nurseries that had relaxed their ban on guns, swords, and violent games had reported that boys had more fun together, made closer friendships, and became more creative in other areas of play, such as dressing up as princes in fairy tales. Most such nurseries found that levels of real fighting between boys declined. Staff who stood back and watched children play-fighting, instead of intervening, discovered that they were much more careful to avoid injuries than had been believed, the book says. The children often agreed rules of the game between themselves to ensure that nobody got hurt. "This has particularly been observed in episodes of sword fighting and superhero-karate style fight scenarios," Ms Holland writes. Yet because of their prejudices, staff in many centres felt uncomfortable about allowing boys to make guns and swords out of toy bricks and other materials. "At best, do we respond to their energy and exuberance as irritatingly alien and male? At worst, do we see them as wife-beaters, armed robbers and rapists in the making?" Ms Holland writes. "Do our sincere desires to eradicate violence cloud our ability to interpret their behaviour as play?" A refusal to accept war games meant nursery staff were missing opportunities to talk to children about events they witnessed on television. Many nurseries reported seeing children pretending to be aircraft and knocking down tower blocks made of bricks after the September 11 terrorist attack in New York. Ms Holland told The Times: "The idea that they can leave these things behind at the nursery gate has to be changed, and that is one reason why practitioners are challenging zero tolerance.

NEON needs to head over to their local Hyundai dealership while the big "DUH" sale is going on.........

So instead of being outside and learning a useful hobby they can eat icecream and get fat. great.

Excellent post gunsmith. I think that is very accurate. When boys are told they are bad for being boys then they will gravitate more towards actual bad boy images they are presented with as an outlet for what they come to percieve as bad emotions or desires. I think many gang problems are fueled by this desire to do something masculine and exciting because they lack an acceptible informal aggressive outlet.

Acting out agression while defending morals is a normal healthy development that reinforces standing up for the right things. As they grow up they will learn what actions are appropriate and not appropriate in real life, but the gut instinct and desire to act will be based on good reinforced morals. They will be more in harmony with the aggression that is a part of being men and not develop psycological issues that are actualy more likely to make them act out thier aggressive desires in predatory or self destructive ways later in life.

Playing cops and robbers for example is making children focus on a real life lesson, thinking about the difference of those that enforce societies laws, and those that disregard them, and is fun at the same time. Pretending to be knights with swords does the same thing. It is step one in helping them learn that violence fighting for the right causes is appropriate sometimes, and that thier natural tendencies can actualy coexist with thier moral compass. They can learn later in life to what degree and how to manage it, it is simply innocent step 1 in that process.

There is a real psycological and emotional void created in young men when women are soley in charge of thier environment and activities, in both school and afterschool activities and are primarily in charge of the policies governing such locations even when a man may be the caregiver in some situations. The women often view aggressive tendancies which are often inappropriate in young girls the same for young boys because they attempt to relate the activities and emotional needs of the boys to themselves and what was appropriate for them. Boys pretend to fight and do aggressive things like act out war games, and girls pretend to get married or care for a pretend baby for reasons.

Ironicly many of these same women would want a man willing to jump in front of harm to save them or thier own family as a husband. Others just live in lala land and think if they try hard enough human nature can be supressed and lala land will become a reality. That is not the result though. Men are not Women. Both have needs that are different and healthy psycological development depends on learning how to properly meet such needs as children and maturing in meeting those needs in socialy acceptable ways into adulthood.

For example most of the dominant sexual predator types come from a similar repressive environment. One where females or a female severely restricted thier ability to mature through abuse or neglect and they have developed an ego power trip that is expressed in sexualy predatory ways. It is how they progressed to deal with repressed male dominance and aggression, by physicly forcing women into submission. We obviously do not wish to create such individuals. So repression can be much more harmful than directing to appropriate healthy morality reinforcing activities, like playing guns and pretending to be "bad guys" or "good guys" which is helping them identify the actions of both.

Hormones and other variables exist that cannot just be erased in "re-education" camps like schools and education organizations are becoming. Since we actualy want men as adults to stand up for what is right and be willing to face violence when confronted with it, in the defense of good and the morals they have grown up with. Even if it was possible to make them less capable of channeling aggression effectively it would not be a smart move.

Yet it is the feminine desire to nurture that leads to more women and feminine men (not meant to insult men that do not feel this applies to them) to seek employment in child care and education, so such environments are disproportionaly feminine in policies and activities. This means that locations where children spend more time in school, in after school programs, and in college and universities will be subject to more feminine than masculine perspectives. The result is a more feminine society and educated people being more inclined to have feminine political views, while at the same time having masculine needs.
This tends to lead to social breakdowns in various parts of society due to imbalance.

Organized sports is often provided as that sole outlet to children, but that is only a partial outlet and does not promote the same development or lead to an outlet which is as available later in life. Part of the whole developmental process is allowing them to create something and mentaly mature. Already strictly organized games with formal rules do not allow them to explore and allow the maturation and understanding of how thier needs and perceptions apply to social interactions.

tell ya this much. i know springfield. and i can garentee, the kids who are at risk arnt attending ice cream socials.