Posted on 12/27/2015 7:34:16 AM PST by Altariel
I thought young Freeper parents could use a reference thread for "everything your child should know about toy gun safety/ gun safety.
For instance:
1) Don't point toy guns at children too young to play with them. 2) Play with toy guns with an adult present. 3 ) Toy guns are outside toys.
Your house rules may vary, but I think having a conservative resource for this information would be a welcome response to more statist notions.
What are your house rules? What do you teach (or have you taught) your children?
Happened to my son and his friends. After playing “war” in the park and as they were waking home, they were stopped by the police. They were polite and respectful and the police let them go without an issue. Someone must have called the police.
I’m sure happy I never had the restrictions imposed by some of the above.
As kids we played cops & robbers with cap pistols just about anyplace. We were also very much aware real guns kill and that it is simply illegal to do so.
You use the toy guns as a teaching tool. You explain how to handle a real gun using the toy gun. There are lots of teaching aids that are not the real thing even in the adult world. A child will not be confused between a toy gun with a red tip and a real gun. You train them.
We grew up with loaded guns in the house, but that was a different time in East Los Angeles. Most homes were well armed, as it was just a few years after the cessation of WWII, and those returning from war felt naked without having a gun or two around.
My dad had a revolver, a shotgun, and a rifle close at hand. But we knew the difference between our cap pistols and the real thing, and also knew the real guns were absolutely off limits, unless my dad was cleaning them and we could ask how they worked and that sort of thing.
Of course, our media was vastly different. Shows like The Rifleman, Sky King, Lone Ranger, Fury, Roy Rogers, even Lassie had no shortage of both good and bad gun usage. The bad gun usage was usually accompanied by a black hat.
It wasn’t unusual to see kids with BB guns walking down the street on their way to a field to go plinking. Dads were supportive, moms would usually wring their hands and worry about shooting an eye out. But no one called the cops. Now a similar event would elicit SWAT teams rappelling from black helicopters in full battle gear.
I took my own two kids to the range when they were about 9 to learn the basics of safe gun handling with bolt action 22s. They both turned into good shots. And one became a Marine, the other works retail in San Francisco.
I don’t worry about either one where firearms are concerned.
Same deal when we were kids. Everybody had cap guns then we graduated to BB guns and about age 11 supervised .22 rifles. I still have the bolt action single shot .22 I learned on.
Toy guns should look like toy guns. Like the old see through plastic squirt guns or the old clunker pot metal cap guns.
Living in the interior of Alaska, all toy guns are indoor guns. My children play with toy guns. They know the difference between play and real.
Pretending the toy gun is real and has similar safety concerns teaches the child the real gun is like a toy and not that dangerous.
I greatly disagree with this approach and teach my children how to use and respect real guns. I don’t teach them how to drive with toys either.
Any equating of the two lowers the respect for the possible harm from the real.
Teaching a child how to hold and aim and gun safety and all that using a toy/fake gun is wrong. Okay.
Don’t bring a toy knife to a toy gun fight.
My rules are simple - no toy guns that look anything like real guns.
I was crossing a parking lot when a man appeared from behind a van holding an Uzi and yelling angrily at someone I could not see. His young boy then also walked into view. I think he had taken the very realistic toy away from him for some infraction. Our eyes met and he turned red realizing he had scared the hell out of me. We looked at each other for a moment and then he walked to the van, threw the toy in,and walked away.
Yup. Absolutely no gunplay in church. No gunplay at the dinner table, either.
Ditto horses, alligators, karate masters, hockey playing, ninjas, spies (ours AND theirs), knights, piranhas, dragons, and any other critters that Wbill Jr’s imagination can come up with.
Rest of the house is fair game, until I get tired of the yelling. Oftentimes, I join in. :-)
I can see that given weather conditions. We played with them outdoors so (a) nothing would be broken by projectiles (b) noone woke the baby and (c) we got fresh air and exercise.
Sad. Chop off private part and act like a girl God should have made your father.
Hehheh. It sounds like rule 2 quickly succeeded rule 1.
Maybe in places like California or some metroplexes. Haven’t heard of it happening in, say, rural Texas, but I could be wrong.
I suppose you expect us to believe that *the kids* caused the fire. ;)
Very quickly... the Christmas wrapping paper was still on the floor. It was like how real shooting witnesses describe an incident... "It all happened so fast.."
The military use young children engaging in play?
Or are their training tools used in exactly the same manner as they use real weapons?
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