Honey, Hide the Celery! Boys Genetically Driven to Weaponize Ordinary Items Due to Toy Gun Control

On Saturday I viewed much of the Fox News mockumentary, "Reel Politics: If Hollywood Ran America." It was disappointing, largely because it did not portray what America would be like with Hollywood celebrities holding important political offices in Washington, it instead merely named which celebrities Fox News felt would be appointed by Hollywood to fill various cabinet posts. There was some humor in the selections, such as Jane Fonda as Secretary of Defense (sorry to my milblogger readers!), but I had hoped the comedy program would delve into the actual policies the Hollywood liberals would implement and the disastrous results of those policies.

While still considering the frightening scenario of Tim Robbins or Alec Baldwin running our government, I happened upon a seemingly unrelated, but delightful, article at WashingtonPost.com by Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University. Professor Turley's article takes an unintended swipe at an issue near and dear to the Hollywood liberal heart: Gun control. However, this is no ordinary, predictable gun control article, since the guns people are demanding be banned range from plastic to an index finger and thumb held in gun shape: Toys or imaginary guns. Applying the situations described in Hurley's article to the question of what America's gun control laws could regress into if Hollywood liberal activists held positions such as Attorney General or Chief Justice of the Supreme Court provides an unsettling vision of the future.

Turley's wonderful article, titled "My Boys Like Shootouts. What's Wrong With That?", describes his encounters with parents who do not allow their own children to play with toy guns of any kind and seek to enforce this zero tolerance toy gun policy on other children and parents as well, threatening not to allow children to play together and either not attending parties of friends who play with toy guns or not inviting any plastic gun-toting tots to their own parties. Of course, this sounds ludicrous and perhaps an exaggerated reaction by only a few parents out there, but as Turley relates through his own stories and some amazing examples from across America, the toy gun control lobby is growing in numbers and influence in many neighborhoods, perhaps even your own.

Turley begins by relating when he first noticed that what he considered normal role playing adventures for his three young boys was generating unexpected reactions from other parents in Alexandria, Virginia:

I first noticed the "shunning" at the most unlikely of events. Each year on Labor Day, my Alexandria community has a "Wheel Day" parade in which hundreds of kids convert their bikes, scooters and wagons into different fantasy vehicles. Last year, we turned our red wagon into a replica Conestoga wagon with real sewn canvas over wooden ribs, wooden water barrels, quarter horse -- and, yes, plastic rifles. It was a big hit and the kids won first prize for their age group. The celebration, however, was short lived. As soon as one mother spotted the toy rifles inside the wagon, she pulled her screaming children out of the event, announcing that she would not "expose them" to guns. After some grumbling, my friends and I eventually dismissed the matter as some earth mother gone berserk.

But then it happened again.

My 4-year-old son, Aidan, brought his orange Buzz Lightyear plastic ray gun to "the pit," as our neighborhood playground is known. As he began pursuing an evildoer -- his 6-year-old brother, Jack -- around the playground, a mother froze with an expression of utter revulsion. Glaring alternately from Aidan to me, she waited for a few minutes before grabbing her son and proclaiming loudly that he could not play there "if that boy is going to be allowed to play with guns."

Turley found it ironic that he found himself on the defensive side in a gun control battle, given his political views:

My wife and I are hardly poster parents for the National Rifle Association. We are social liberals who fret over every detail and danger of child rearing. We do not let our kids watch violent TV shows and do not tolerate rough play. Like most of our friends, we tried early on to avoid any gender stereotypes in our selection of games and toys. However, our effort to avoid guns and swords and other similar toys became a Sisyphean battle. Once, in a fit of exasperation, my wife gathered up all of the swords that the boys had acquired as gifts and threw them into the trash. When she returned to the house, she found that the boys had commandeered the celery from the refrigerator to finish their epic battle. Forced to choose between balanced diets and balanced play, my wife returned the swords with strict guidelines about where and when pirate fights, ninja attacks and Jedi rescues could occur.

Intrigued by the passionate resistance to toy guns, Turley decided to explore the psychology behind toy selections for children, and what impact toys, specifically guns and other weapon-like toys have on young boys in their formative play years:

. . . I found a library of academic studies. . . . The thrust was that gender differences do exist in the toys and games that boys and girls tend to choose. The anecdotal evidence in my neighborhood (with more than 60 young kids in a four-block radius) was even clearer: Parents of boys reported endless variations on the celery swords. There seems to be something "hard-wired" with the XY chromosome that leads boys to glance at a small moss-covered branch and immediately see an air-cooled, camouflaged, fully automatic 50-caliber Browning rifle with attachable bayonet.

Many parents can relate to Holley and Warren Lutz, who thought that after their daughter Seeley, they could raise her little brother, Carver, in a weapon-free house. Holley realized her error when she gave 10-month-old Carver a Barbie doll and truck one day. The little boy examined both and then proceeded to run Barbie over repeatedly with the truck. By 2, he was bending his sister's Barbies into L-shapes and using them as guns.

As a father of three young boys, Turley took seriously the question of whether playing with toy weapons could potentially awaken "some deep and dark violent gene" potentially found in all boys. Turley's research, however, led him and his wife to conclude that nature dictated their boys' choice of toys and the imaginary adventures they acted out while playing with toy guns and swords. Despite his rationale, founded as it was in research, psychology, and genetic science, neighbors and parents of his children's friends were not convinced.

Turley observed that despite the violent scenarios his children could have acted out with their toy weapons, something remarkable occurred that suggests something profound about toys, parenting, and hero imitation:

when their best friend recently invited them to his Army-themed birthday party, it didn't bother us a bit (though some parents did refuse to let their children attend). In fact, I was struck by how, more than combat fighting, the boys tended to act out scenes involving rescuing comrades or defending the wounded. What I saw was not boys experimenting with carnage and slaughter, but modeling notions of courage and sacrifice. They were trying to experience the emotions at the extremes of human conduct: facing and overcoming fear to remain faithful to their fellow soldiers.

While violent video games perhaps provide too much stimulus to the imagination, creating actual scenarios of lethal force for points rather than patriotism, toy guns and swords alone do not influence children to become violent. In the case of Turley's boys, and billions of young boys over centuries, toy weapons more often were used to imitate noble figures or occupations in a society, such as policemen and military heroes. If we attempt to protect boys from toy weapons in a misguided effort to shield them from good and bad uses of violence, how will they grow up to protect themselves and their nation? If we rob them of their imaginations and dreams of courage and rescue, what type of soldiers will our armed forces consist of in the future? How many will want to place themselves in harm's way in law enforcement or intelligence agencies? All of these require knowledge and use of weapons to be used for morally justified societal needs, such as protection of the innocent and preservation of a nation.

If Hollywood ran America and established the naive gun control policies they espouse, America would be filled with gender-neutral toys that send mixed messages to confused children who will have no outlet for their youthful, playful aggressions. Turley provided a small but alarming sampling of actual incidents nationwide in which young children have been punished, suspended, and even expelled for behavior as benign as pointing a piece of chicken at another child and saying "pow, pow, pow." It would appear that the liberal campaign to make America "enlightened" like European firearm-free nations is exerting enormous influence at the grass roots level, even in formerly play tolerant suburbs.

What toys do your children choose to play with when presented with several choices? After reading Turley's article and perusing some of the psychological books he examined, you may learn more about your children and their natural affinities and values than you may think. Chances are, if you can never find the celery in the refrigerator, your child may be smuggling replacement swords to his guerrilla army comrades at the playground.