Glorified G

Toy guns. I had an arsenal of them when I was a kid; pistols and rifles and submachine guns, from an M16 to an Uzi to an M1 to a Winchester repeater, I waged imaginary wars across several hundred years of armed conflict. My campaigns were waged across the fields and rolling hills of Illinois and Oklahoma - an unused drainage ditch became a trench on the Western Front, or an Iwo Jima foxhole, the patch of trees down the street became Belleau Wood, or the Wilderness. Get shot and you "died" for ten seconds, and the bad guys always surrendered just before dinnertime.

The other day I was out in the yard, watering some of the plants while Lucas played with his favorite toy dump truck. He came across the sprayer attachment for the hose, picked it up and pointed it at me. "Bow!", he yelled. "Bow! Bow!" As a parent, I do my best to not overreact to "bad" things that the kid does; he is two, and so deserves a bit of slack. But my reaction to his playing with "guns" (he's done similar things with the odd stick, spoon, and banana) surprised me - part of me was absolutely horrified. It's the part that carries an image that I saw on CNN, in the early days of the current Iraq war - a man, perhaps a father, digging through the rubble of a bombed-out, pulling a kid no older than my own out from the ruins, a naked, blackened bloody little boy, still alive and screaming in absolute terror. It's the feeling that runs through me after reading stories like this, the feeling of having battery acid poured onto one's heart. It's looking at kids like these and wondering what would I do, if that dying or dead kid was my son, and not coming up with an answer because it's just too much, an abyss that no parent should ever have to stare into.

Heavy stuff, and if I told you that I gave this topic any serious thought before having a kid I'd be lying. But the kid is growing up quickly, and he's impressionable; I don't recall seeing Bob the Builder pop a cap in Pritchard's mangy ass, but he has seen The Incredibles about 54,239 times, and that flick has it's fair share of gun-toting baddies. This gun thing is one of the many, many conundrums that somehow didn't make the instruction manual that came along with the child. But I wanted to apply all of the logic, reasoning, and parental guidance I'd accumulated over the past two years, and address Lucas' desire to shoot/water me.

"Hey Lucas?"

"Daddy?"

"Don't do that."

"Why?"

"Because it's icky."

"Ok. Icky."

From the mouths of babes, right?