Dispatches from a homemade ban on handguns
My son’s indignant question: “Mummy, did you throw out all the Lego guns?”
I thought I might weigh in on the current debate over a possible handgun ban in Toronto, Ontario, and even Canada. I myself instituted a handgun ban in my own home about 13 years ago, when I gave birth to my eldest son. It’s not like we were awash in weaponry before that, but when you have a boy in the house, the chances of weaponry coming into your home go up exponentially.
“Mummy, did you hear me? Where are the Lego guns?”
I was, in hindsight, fairly naive. I was completely confident that I could keep guns out of my home not only by banning toy guns, but by banning movies, video games, TV shows, action figures, and comic books. Kids, get ready for the best pacifist childhood EVER!
My eldest son became an expert in making pretend semi-automatic rifles from rainbow coloured Mega-Bloks. I dismembered them. He smuggled tiny action figures and their assault firearms home from a friend’s house. I confiscated them. He built replicas of guns he saw in Star Wars books at the bookstore — intricate assemblies of dowels, wooden toys, Jenga blocks, meticulously put together with a glue gun and spray-painted all white, not unlike Louise Nevelson’s famous monochromatic wooden sculptures. I threw them out. After I caved under pressure, my mother took him to see a Star Wars film, and he begged and begged for Star Wars Lego. How stupid of me not to realize that every single mini figure in the box would have its own tiny plastic handgun. Et tu, Lego?! At first I “accidentally” vacuumed up the ones left on the carpet, but that was taking too long so one day I just collected them from their hiding place (the drawer of his bedside table — rookie mistake, son) and tossed them in the garbage.
It turns out that Lego has so many tiny, intricate parts these days that you can make a very convincing Lego gun with pieces from otherwise innocent sets (the trailer, the airlift helicopter, the transport truck…). He’s bested me with these; he knows how expensive Lego is, and that I can’t bring myself to throw out even the smallest bits. But in a weak protest statement, I still take apart his wee gun assemblies and throw the pieces back to their bins.
In the beginning, our gun control came from my belief that violence should never be thought of in terms of fun, and therefore disassociated from its consequences. I still believe this, even though it runs counter to our common cultural practice of allowing kids — at a time when their experiences are having direct effect on how their brains are learning to see the world — to spend significant amounts of their lives playing violent video games. I wonder if this is why the mass shooting at a video game tournament in Florida at the end of August got so little media coverage: to mix metaphors, the debate about the psychological effects of playing the games came home to roost but no one wanted to look in the mirror.
But I digress.
A few years into having kids, I started to notice how toy weapons homogenize children’s play. When toy figures and vehicles have weapons (be they swords, blasters, lasers or whatever), extended narrative play has one storyline: violent confrontation. Just the presence of a tiny toy weapon is enough to drive the whole shebang into assault mode.
Absent of any armed toys, I’ve watched my children launch into a variety of narratives: a birthday party, a horse race, a baseball game, a camping trip …. Add one tiny plastic gun shaped to fit into a tiny plastic hand and it’s straight back to war stories, especially for my boys. Creativity cedes to conflict. In other words: when the toy guns are taken away, the kids are forced to devise more complex storylines that involve a wider range of human dynamics, and that’s a challenge. The war game, on the other hand, is such an easy one, with the lines of conflict and plot so clearly drawn.
It’s not much different for grown-ups, is it? If the tools of violence are available to us, we’re more prone to using them, rather than working through the much more difficult, prolonged tasks of conflict avoidance and resolution. So: take the most damaging tools away. Sport-shooters, so passionate about hitting targets, will cry foul, of course; such an easy, colossal BANG from such a tiny trigger! I’d suggest they get into archery or knife-throwing or something. There are no bump stocks for bows and arrows.