I grew up in a similar family of activists. We, too, were forbidden toy guns and other war toys. My brother and I were more likely to play games like "protester at the Pentagon" than cops and robbers. I've been thinking recently about why toy guns didn't have a grip on our imaginations as kids. I suspect it was because we understood -- were made to understand -- what the big gun of U.S. militarism had done in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Indochina, and throughout Central America. Our dad had seen the big gun of war up close and personal. His finger -- the same one he pointed at us when we were in trouble -- had pulled the trigger again and again in France during World War II. He was decorated there, but had zero nostalgia for the experience. He was, in fact, deeply ashamed of the dashing figure he had once cut when home from the front. And so, dad screwed up a new kind of courage to say no to war and violence, to killing of any kind. His knowledge of war imbued his nonviolent peace activist mission with a genuine, badass, superhero style swagger.
Our parents -- our community of ragtag, countercultural Catholic peace activists -- made that no-violence, no-killing, no-matter-what point again and again. In fact, my early experience of guns was the chilling fear of knowing that, in protest, my father, mother, and their friends were walking into what they called "free fire zones" on military bases, where well-armed, well-trained soldiers were licensed to kill intruders. So we didn't point toy guns at each other. We didn't pow-pow with our fingers or sticks. We crossed those fingers and hoped that the people we loved would be safe.
Our inner city Baltimore neighborhood, where crack cocaine madness was just taking hold, drove that point home on a micro level. Our house was robbed at gunpoint more than once -- and we had so little worth taking. We watched a man across the street bleed to death after being stabbed repeatedly in a fight over nothing. People from our house ran to help and were there for far too long before an ambulance even arrived. We knew as little kids that violence was no laughing matter, nor child's play. It was serious business and was to be resisted.
As parents tend to do, Patrick and I are passing this tradition on to our kids, hopefully without the emotional scarring that went with our childhoods of resistance. They don't have guns or action figures or any other toy implements of death. Still, we've been watching Seamus, our Team Elsa (from the Disney blockbuster Frozen) son, as he's recently begun turning every stick into an imaginary gun. This is, of course, happening just as, in the headlines of the moment, actual guns are turning so many previously real people into statistics. Under the circumstances, how could I not find myself thinking about toy guns, real guns, the nature of play, the role of imagination, the place of parents, and how to (or whether to) police (ha!) that imaginary play?
When my stepdaughter Rosena was about four, she found a toy dagger at the playground, somehow smuggled it home, and was stabbing one of her beloved stuffed animals, a bunny, repeatedly with it.
In the other room, I could hear the thumps on the bedroom floor and called out, "What are you doing?"
"Stabbin' my bunny. I kilt her," she responded matter-of-factly.
Seizing a "teaching moment" and undoubtedly gripped by my own childhood experiences and memories of my parents, I blustered into the bedroom with a shoebox. "Now, your bunny is dead," I announced in my version of over-the-top momism. "You know what happens when living things die, right? It's forever, right? Now, we have to bury her." Rosena and I then "buried" the doll on a high shelf in her closet. I told her that we cannot hurt or kill the things (or people) we love. I told her that, because she had "killed" that bunny, she could never play with it again.
About a week later, I slipped it back into her toy basket and, when she asked why, assured her that I thought she wouldn't hurt her toys like that again. She agreed. I recall that episode now with a certain embarrassment, but when I recently heard Rosena explaining death and loss to her little brother and sister, I thought: oh, maybe the drama of the shoebox burial was actually helpful in some fashion.
Toys matter. We've put a fair amount of thought into what might be called toy curation in our household. We've bought nothing new and little used. Mostly, we've accepted shipments of hand-me-downs from friends who just wanted "this crap" out of their houses. No guns came with them, thankfully. After all, even toy guns can mean death under the wrong circumstances.
A year ago, I visited the Cuddell Recreation Center in Cleveland with my daughter Madeline and a group of friends. That broad stretch of ball fields and paths, anchored by a gazebo and a playground, was where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was fatally shot by Officer Timothy Loehmann in November 2014. Rice, an African American, was playing with an Airsoft pellet gun that a friend's Dad had bought at Walmart. A replica of an actual Colt pistol, it shot plastic pellets and looked pretty real, since the orange tip signifying "toy" was missing. However, Officer Loehmann, investigating a report that a man was carrying a gun in the park, was moving too fast to notice much. He sped up and began shooting even before his squad car stopped moving. Rice's hands were still reportedly in his pockets.
Though Loehmann was not indicted, the city of Cleveland paid a $6 million settlement to the Rice family and demolished the gazebo where the boy was shot. In the park that day, local activists described the shooting and its aftermath to our group. Half listening, I followed Madeline as she toddled into the playground. I tried to imagine Samaria Rice's pain in this unremarkable place made part shrine, part soapbox by a police officer's quick trigger finger, racism, and her son's blood.
I thought about that toy gun in Tamir Rice's hand and what might have been going through his head as he pointed it and played with it. Despite the age difference, it couldn't have been that far from what regularly goes through my son's head when he picks up a stick and points it: pop, boom, wow! The difference, of course, is that Seamus, blond and freckled and unmistakably white, would run little risk of being shot down by a policeman, even eight years from now with a replica toy gun in his hands.
Blasters, Blasters, Everywhere
Toys are a big business in this country, raking in $19.4 billion in 2015, according to the retail tracking firm NPD Group. Our family is not responsible for even a dime of this. Not surprisingly, then, my announcement that we were all going to spend a rainy afternoon at a local Toys "R" Us store came like a bolt from the blue for the kids.
I wanted to see what kind of toy weaponry was for sale there. I was curious, among other things, about whether the boys at school who had taught Seamus about superheroes, bad guys, and Star Wars had ignited in my son a love of weaponry; I was curious, that is, as to how he would react to the walls of guns I imagined Toys "R" Us displaying.
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