WHEN I was a child, I loved sweet cigarettes. Back in the 1970s, they were considered a non-toxic way for kids to feel grown up. I must have "smoked" thousands of sweet cigarettes in my time, but never once – not for even the most fleeting second – have I ever wanted a drag of the real thing.
Perhaps it's because my sweet-cigarette addiction has given me first-hand experience of replica-killing apparatus, but I'm pleased to hear that a case study carried out in a Perthshire primary school has concluded that it's OK to let small children p
lay with toy guns.
Last year, Abernethy Primary lifted a long-standing clampdown on allowing its pupils to run around waving plastic pistols at each other and shouting: "Bang! Bang! You're dead!" The good news is that – so far – none of the children involved has held up any banks and the researchers observing them now believe that allowing them to be relaxed about using fake firearms has actually improved standards of behaviour.
Apparently, if you attempt to stop children – and let's face it, we're mainly talking about little boys here – pretending to murder each other, they'll just go and do it behind your back. The Abernethy study showed that if you allow them free rein, but quietly supervise them, chances are you'll become more involved with their play and get a better understanding of what really goes on in their violence-crazed prepubescent brains.
Children love being boisterous. I know I did, but it hasn't turned me into a murderer, just as enjoying Tom and Jerry hasn't made me into a thug and watching Popeye hasn't made me like spinach.
When I was about seven, I had a huge fight with my (male) cousin, who was the same age, over a toy gun. I loved that gun so much; I can still remember every detail about it. It was silver plastic, with a fabulous dark-red handle, and it made a deeply satisfactory cracking sound when it fired caps. It was exactly the accessory I needed to complete my cowgirl outfit (I still have a weakness for fringing) and I had to have it. So, I fought my cousin tooth and nail, won, and kept the gun. Maybe it wasn't the way the United Nations would have settled the matter, but it worked for us.
But what goes around comes around and, for the first time as an adult, I found myself confronted with the gun question when I took my two-and-a-half-year-old son down to London for his cousin's second birthday party recently. The theme was "Cowboys" (probably because the mummies of East Dulwich can't bring themselves to mention "Native Americans") and it was only after I'd got there and unveiled Junior in all his glory as the Magnificent One, that I realised I was the only mother who had provided her child with a gun.
Not only that, but whenever the trigger was pulled, the end of the gun glowed red and it made a very loud noise which would not have gone unnoticed in the OK Corral. Every child loved it – the girls included – but not all the parents seemed comfortable with the butterfly buns being used as target practice for a facsimile murder weapon. Eyebrows were raised and I imagined them muttering behind their Boden catalogues: "Who's that heathen Northerner with her aggressive ways?" But honestly, how the hell can you be a cowboy without a gun?
The West was not won by chatting. Nobody ever made a film called "The Good, the Nice and the Even Nicer", or "The Man Who Smiled At Liberty Valance". If you're going to be a cowboy, you've got to have a gun – end of story. And let's face it, if you dress little boys as cowboys and don't give them guns, they'll just improvise with two pointed fingers and a thumb trigger.
Believe it or not, I'm all for a ban on real firearms, but I don't accept that toy guns necessarily contribute to a gun culture. Children are intelligent enough to understand the difference between reality and play and we should let them play to their hearts' content, so they can get the need to go "Bang! Bang!" out of their systems. One day, I'll explain to my son that real guns are for losers. Until then, I'm happy to let him mow down countless imaginary baddies with a make-believe Magnum. Does that make me a bad mother? So what. So shoot me.
The full article contains 768 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
