Posted on 07/30/2014 2:19:39 AM PDT by servo1969
I’m a bit miffed, I’m not gonna lie. Not for myself mind you, but for a little four-year-old boy who has the distinct misfortune of residing with a mom who fears guns. Allow me to explain; in this morning’s Washington Post “On Parenting” there’s a piece by Zsofia McMullen. The title of the piece is: “My four year old loves toy guns and I don’t know how to parent that.”
In it, she describes in great detail, her son’s infatuation with gun play and pretend violence. The piece starts out innocuously enough, with a detailed description of the little boy’s imaginative play centered on action figures most of whom are the archetypal hero, policemen, soldiers and the like. They vanquish dragons, dispatch pirates and rescue the princess all while brandishing swords and guns, sometimes on horseback, other times driving motorized vehicles with zeal.
Sounds like fun right? Any mother of boys and sometimes a tomboyish girl can recall the sounds of explosions voiced in the tiny inimitable tones of a child’s voice. I enjoyed hearing my son set up battlefields of Legos and watching the good guys victor over the bad. But clearly, I don’t have a strong enough fear of violence or guns!
Pretty early on in Zsofia’s musings she delineates her separation from anything having to do with guns. She’s only ever heard of one person actually owning a gun while she was growing up. She never actually saw it. And other such nonsense. Then she married into a gun owning family and was exposed to the horror of seeing firearms casually placed out in the open and no one passed out or spontaneously combusted.
In fact, I never saw a gun until I met my father-in-law a few years ago. He lives on a farm in central Pennsylvania, and the cabinet next to his bed is filled with shotguns. He uses them to hunt and to shoot sick animals or unwelcome groundhogs. One time when we were visiting, he left his shotgun casually leaning against a car we wanted to drive. Seeing my husband pick up and move the gun made me queasy and uncomfortable. What if it goes off? Do guns do that, just by accident?
Wow. Do guns just go off? Did she really just ask that? She then admits she’s totally inexperienced and untrained, which is a travesty on her part for remaining so for at least four years in light of her extended family’s interest in and use of guns! Why not take a firearms safety class and eliminate any of those awful feelings she’s experiencing? Why does Zsofia waste time wondering how her son “found out” about guns? Why not begin to teach him that they are tools, to be used for sport, hunting, and to defend oneself and the lives of innocents. Clearly her son has a healthy interest in saving others and a desire to enjoy doing so in pretend play using weapons. The writer describes intentionally not buying him toy guns only to see him create them out of other found objects as well as shaping them from his food. Good for the little fellow, he’s got a tough road to hoe in teaching his mom a thing or two about childhood ingenuity, but he’s well on his little way.
At this point, I just want to take Zsofia out for coffee to a place with wifi and use the Google to show her statistics on what most impacts the likelihood of a childhood ending in criminality. Societal and familial ills are the culprits in criminality; not having a father present and engaged, growing up poor, unhealthy obsessions with violent video gaming coupled with mental illness. Yup. So far her son seems pretty safe from becoming a murderous thug!
She closes out by stating her resignation to his desire to play this way and talks of sharing facts with little Sam, like “sometimes it’s the unarmed hero that wins the battle”. That’s a load of bollocks. If it’s a battle, it means at least one side is armed. If one side isn’t – that side usually goes down smoking, hard. The sentiment is cute and trite and not worthy of her son. Why not teach him the canard of peace through strength? It’s much healthier, more interesting and factually based.
The chances of my having a cuppa with the writer are pretty slim, so I ask you – please disabuse young mothers in your sphere of their need to eliminate natural reality based play from the lives of their testosterone laden boys. It’s a slap in the face to those that protect us and serve in our armed forces. It’s an insult to those that regularly use weapons for sport, hunting, and implies innate wrongdoing in owning guns. We don’t need anymore of that. Zsofia, learn how to parent that. Oh and Sam? Battle on buddy, battle on.
Advice: never father a child with a woman who spells her name Zsofia.
(Z)sofia is proudly ignorant. It is difficult to change the mind of somebody who intentionally avoids learning anything.
Maybe she’s from Eastern Europe. I read on FR that men are supposed to marry women from Eastern Europe.
Again, I would call for universal and compulsory training in the care, feeding, use and responsibility with handling of rifles, shotguns, and pistols, by members of both genders (and there are still only two). This training should be well under way by the time the youths enter middle school.
The respect for and applicable use of side arms is even more important than sex education, and for much the same reason. What you don’t know CAN hurt you, and in ways that go way beyond merely the first effects.
Near-universal familiarity with and availability of the broad range of firearms then in existence was one of the contributing factors in the ability of American youth to go into battle against the Japanese and German war machines in the Second World War, and emerge victorious. Today, we have lost that advantage, with the superstitious attitude that has grown up around personal defense of all kinds. In this fear of making even the least move toward self-defense, the victim provides a most lop-sided advantage to the aggressor.
That kind of timidity never ends well.
She doesn’t know how to parent that? Maybe she should learn to write decent English before taking on something so heavy as motherhood and cap pistols.
Pretty sad that she’s not alone in this irrational fear of guns. The reality is, drowning or a car accident is more likely to kill a child than a gun will.
Typical hoplophobe. She is unable to rationally deal with firearms due to her excessive fear, and yet presumes she should educate her son about them, despite acknowledging that she knows nothing about them.
Eastern European women are supposed to bring their own weapon to the relationship, preferably a Makarov in a thigh holster.
When I was about 5, I told my mother that I never wanted to be in a war. She was folding clothes on the couch. As casual as you can imagine she said, Well, if you do, that’s the price we all have to pay for freedom. That was about 1957. She graduated from high school in 1942.
My sister was like this with her son and my BIL let her get away with it!
Everyone should be made to shoot, just once. We all know that once you shoot a gun, it's so much fun you'll want to do it more.
I mean paintball, laser tag, plinking! it's so much fun! You don't have to shoot breathing things! I was completely astounded to see what my 20 gauge did to a 5 gallon Wesson oil container!
I instantly dislike this person ... yes, I'm prejudiced against people with weirdly spelled names.
I'm rarely wrong about it, either..
Now I'll read the rest of the article ...
I was right.
I married a girl from East Virginia ... not sure if that's the same thing ...
She loves blasting orange clay 'frisbee' things with her 12ga.
No, it read like academic gobbled-gook which I loathe and war against. I didn’t grow up around guns but we all had water pistols, cap guns, plastic machine guns (how else do you imitate Vic Morrow on Combat?), air guns, bats, clubs and all manner of violent toys. And we were girls!
Little boys should be taught that when a woman tells them to stop pretending to play with guns, they should instead sit at a desk and repeatedly press an imaginary button.
“What are you doing now, Johnny?”
“Launching thermonuclear ICBMs.”
Get over it, woman. I had every toy gun you could imagine when I was a kid. I played every game possible with toy guns. I am non-violent and not criminal.
A lot of authors make crap up about their own lives to make a point or come up with an interesting article.
I don't know if Zsofia is literally real, but I have met people who exhibit exactly the mental problems described in this article. Most of them are women.
I've raised two sons, now 12 & 25. Our closets and garage have dozens of toy guns. My 4 YO grandson loves playing with them, as well as playing Angry Birds, watching Paw Patrol ("Chase is on the case!"), and he just finished up his first season of T-ball.
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