This morning's post from a friend about her son turning a pork chop bone into a gun and "shooting" his sister at the dinner table made me chuckle, and burn at the same time. Her observation was that "everything's a gun to a boy" was very true, and so looked down on in today's culture.
My generation was raised with and around guns. We understood the danger of real guns, handled them safely and with respect, yet played with all manner of toy ones, shot each other with impunity from behind rocks and trees, played Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, Elliot Ness, Army/Marines and lots of other things equally as violent. We were the killed and the killers, depending on whose turn it was. Yet we turned out OK. We didn't take out Dad's deer rifle and play with it; we understood that play was play, and reality was reality. Many of our parents had been in WWII or Korea and we knew, at some level, the horrors of true battle.
Today, kids who do what we did are shunned in one way or another. They are taught that guns, of any sort, are evil in and of themselves. A kid is punished for drawing pictures of guns at school; another for making a pastry into the shape of a gun...what is society doing? Guns cannot be dis-invented. They're part of our history as a nation and a civilization. They appeal to a certain segment of us (women as well as men, girls as well as boys) and we enjoy them when properly used.
Instead of worrying about little boys playing with toy or imagined guns, lets worry about kids understanding the value of life. A pork chop bone pointed across a table isn't going to kill someone; neither will a semi-automatic rifle in someone's closet. An angry person with a hammer at hand however might lash out. Let's worry about teaching the value of life, not making one machine the evil of our society. Let's teach our young folks how to deal with their anger, not take it out on the real or supposed cause of their problems. Let's teach them personal responsibility, not the blame-game that populates our land. Let's just teach our kids right from wrong...oh, wait, that requires an absolute source of authority--we can't have that any more, can we?
The Bible teaches us to train up Children in the way they should go, and it gives us great and plentiful instructions on what and how to teach; yet it's ignored and it's authority is denied. The audacity to declare one set of teaching to be "better" than others is decried by the masses...and then they blame the guns.... What's next?
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