My son is eight and he has a new thing now, guns.  I’m not a big gun person.  I own a hand gun and a conceal-carry license.  I rarely take it with me.  Maybe twice a year.  I don’t think about it much.  It’s just a gun.  My son however thinks that guns are the coolest things ever.  He has several toy guns that he runs around with and shoots everything from me and his mother to the cat and dog.  The object of most conversations that he initiates are about guns, different kinds of guns, what one could shoot with a gun, and so forth.  It’s driving my wife crazy.  She grew up in town with parents who did not own guns.  They did not hunt or shoot.  Guns were never a part of their lives.  She doesn’t like them.  She cannot understand why the boy is so fascinated with them.
I grew up around guns.  My dad was a hunter.  Guns were ubiquitous in my childhood.  I had a b.b. gun at a very young age.  I quickly graduated to a shotgun in my early teens.  They were not glorified or made to seem to be anything but utilitarian in nature.  Basically I was taught that guns were for shooting game animals and birds.  We never spoke of them as being for protection.  I think this was implied.  I am comfortable around guns.  They do not have a personae in my mind.  They are neither good nor bad.  They just exist.  I am not a hunter so I do not have a close relationship with my weapon.  We are not on a first name basis.  I have not given it a name like gunny, old silver, or blasty.  I got it because of the old saying (I’m not sure where this comes from.  I think it’s in a movie) ” I would rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”  I fully expect to never need it.  It was still a small price to pay for the feeling of  having a fighting chance if something out of the ordinary ever happened.
My son hasn’t been raised around guns.  I keep my gun safely out of his sight and reach at all times.  I know he sees all the shows on television that features guns as a central component to the plot.  There are cop shows and movie trailers on all the time that have this feature.  We watch very few of these.  Still the imagery has had an effect on  his perception.  He sees guns as an accessory to coolness.  The image he has been bombarded with seems to be that guns are your first line of defense against all evil.  To him a gun is more than a gun.  It’s a symbol of what it means to be a defender of goodness, a protector of what is right.  He sees them as an extension of some ones personality.  Right now he pretends to shoot and fight and all the stuff most of us did at that age.  I know I played war, cops and robbers, and cowboys and indians with the best of them.  The gun was just a prop though.  You were either a cop or a robber.  That’s the personae you portrayed.  He seems to be gun-man.  The gun is the most important character in all of this.  You can understand my paranoia in all this right?  Those school shootings and postal workers shooting people up have made, or should have made, us a little hyper-vigilant about gun violence.  Maybe I’m making way to much out of this.  I just want him to understand that a gun is just a gun.  It has no inherent goodness or badness.  It’s a tool.  A really loud, shiny and pretty tool.  Ah hell, I’m starting to think that a gun is more than a gun now.