The Velveteen Machine Gun

My four-year-old son is a gun-nut, and it is all my fault.

Last summer at our local amusement park, we found ourselves at the arcade. My son loves dinosaurs, of course, so we watched a game there called Jurassic Park Arcade. A quick Google search shows that this game, produced by a company called Raw Thrills, Inc., is publicized as featuring “family-friendly game play,” whatever that means, with “high-reliability guns.”

We watched the preview for a long time; humans shooting (it says “rescuing”) dinosaurs. Then I made my mistake. The kid was satisfied with passively watching the game, but I put in my coins so we could play it. I was just looking for a way to pass some time with my toddler. I was a disengaged parent. I was a fool. Nothing good comes from that.

The guns recoiled and vibrated in his tiny hands and laid waste to everything in his field of view. When it was over, still holding the gun, he asked “what is this called?”

Realizing my mistake, I said, “It’s a… It’s called a zapper.”

He said, “Zapper. Again!” That was the day his love of dinosaurs became a love of guns. Coming home from pre-school the next week, he told me proudly, “It’s not called a zapper, Dada. It’s called a gun.” Obviously, some other kids at school had also been initiated into the world of guns as well.

I’ve been told by my wife, thankfully, that it is not my fault that he has been exposed to guns, and so-called experts like Leonard Sax, author of Boy’s Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men, who have me more worried, frankly, about BPAs and other endocrine disrupters in our food and plastics than anything I did with my kid one Saturday afternoon, but it doesn’t make me feel much better. I’ve got a stack of dog-eared books on the shelf about raising a healthy son, but they’re not helping. Rising sea-levels may get him first anyway. But I digress.

The day of the Parkland massacre we were at a costume shop he likes to go to, when he found the costume prop M-16 machine guns (age 3+ it said on the package). Incredibility realistic looking, (except for that little orange cap on the end of the barrel to help keep him from getting shot by the cops), with even a little rapid-firing clicking sound when you pull the trigger. I let him play with it, and followed him around the store self-consciously with a heavy heart.

This summer it was the shootings in El Paso and Dayton that were on my mind as he asked me to get the toy gun off the shelf of the store. This time I said “No. You know why,” having discussed the recent shootings with him. He watches the news with us sometimes, and we try to explain our world to him. The most toxic by-product of this seems to be how synonymous a dark completion is with crime. Fear and ratings shouldn’t be such a motivating force behind our news stations either. This is all tied together.

Gun enthusiasm in one form or another is ubiquitous in our culture. I could not have simply avoided the arcade that day to prevent his ever learning about guns. My head knows that, but my heart is not so sure.

My kid liked swords and shields, but not the way he likes guns; wanting to know the names of each part, from the trigger to the scope and the difference between a musket and a machinegun, and I keep telling myself that it is all my fault. I don’t even like guns; at least that was my assumption. I have never owned a gun or even fired one for that matter. I don’t remember having a toy gun growing up (home movies show that I had several, but I don’t remember it). I loved Star Wars which has plenty of guns, “zappers,” and I had an Atari 2600 when I was a kid, which had plenty of zapping. But I was never as obsessed with guns as my child seems to be. Maybe I’m just projecting.

The obvious solution is to not take him to those places, to not let him play those games, and not let him watch those shows. I’ve talked to him about gun-safety. We even marched with 200 or so people for the March for Our Lives demonstration in our town last year, but he still loves guns.

I just have to hope this plays out as soon as trucks and tyrannosaurs did, and he moves on to something else, but it’s past that point already. Maybe he will grow out of this, or maybe he is just growing into it. Maybe it is better that he wants to be a police officer or a soldier at age three than at age eighteen. When he was two, he wanted to be an astronaut, and before that a garbage man, so maybe the gun-carrying professions will be replaced soon too.

Well, what kind of father takes his kid to an arcade anyway? Yeah, I know. I’m no father of the year. We’d already been to the library, the park, and the one museum in town. I thought I was doing my best. It obviously isn’t good enough.

Whether dire or simply misguided, the consequences of that day include having nature walks interrupted by looking for “good sticks” that must resemble handguns or machineguns, and missing the lesson of Winnie-the-Pooh because of a fascination with Christopher Robin’s pop-gun. It breaks my heart every time.

How do I best help my son, myself, my family, and my country? I guess I need to know that I haven’t ruined my son. Can you tell me that my son will be okay? That he will never hurt himself or others with a gun? That he is not a “bad” person? That I’m not a bad person? Can you tell me that? Did I do right by you, son? Can you forgive me if I didn’t?

In those dark moments, where my head or heart drifts to an ugly place, I picture a bubble of white healing light building from my heart around myself and those around me, from a feeling of pure love. I can’t change who my son is or what he is interested in, and I guess I shouldn’t want to, but I can begin to forgive myself for the day back then and the day tomorrow when I put a gun in his precious hands. That doesn’t change anything though. It doesn’t change a damn thing.

I hope he is on his way to being a good person, because he keeps getting deeper into being evil and destructive. Zapping “bad guys” is a pretty relative concept. Who decides who is bad, and why does zapping them make you good? My son isn’t quite ready for this moral ambiguity. I guess I’m supposed to navigate this for him. I could use some help.

Aside from the optional two-hour “Daddy Boot Camp” I went to before he was born, I haven’t had much guidance. Google isn’t much help. My son has empathy. He loves our dog and cat, but he does want to see what happens when he pokes the ant hill. I know this is all “normal.”

My son doesn’t know about the second amendment, high capacity magazines, or any of the stuff the rest of us adults worry and debate about, so why do I impose those anxieties on him? Why do I make myself see in him a gun fanatic right-winger I can’t stand? How is that not toxic for our relationship? I tell myself to breathe, make a bubble.

So, here we are a year later, another mass-shooting. His aim is better than ever, and I am as conflicted as I was last summer. I’ve explained to him how my heart hurts because of the shootings this week. I answer all of his questions. I don’t know if that is a strength or a weakness in my parenting, but it’s my default setting.  

I’m not trying to make myself the victim here, as some do. I’ve been told that it’s not my fault, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. It breaks my heart that my son loves, loves, loves guns. Our culture does. My kid sees guns everywhere, on billboards and movie posters, and points it out every time. “Gun! Dada, I see a gun!” I am embarrassed by my son, myself, my country. We have a cultural problem and I see it manifested in this sweet little boy every single day.

I remember when Nerf made footballs. Now they have an overwhelming array of semi-automatic high-capacity toy guns with names like the Revenger and Doomlands. It is the aisle my son heads toward when we go to any department store, and I mean any department store. I have personally never bought him one, but he owns several. At one point, I just gave up and helped him shoot at action figures in his room. Maybe, I thought, by not making this forbidden it would lose its power. It did, for a while, but these guns are still a part of our home and our lives.

The research says these toys and games will not lead my son to be some mass shooter, but that’s not what I am really worried about. I’m disappointed by a culture that makes these weapons of war so central to our identity. I’m disappointed in myself for not being stronger and saying “No, you can’t play with that.” I’m disappointed in a sweet little boy whose imagination has been corrupted by toys whose sole purpose is simulated death and destruction.

I’m not saying these toys or games should be banned or any more restricted than they already are. God, I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m hurt and I’m angry, but I am also complicit.

I am complicit in this gun culture, this love and glorification of violence. How many movies have I cheered at when a bad guy was blown away? How many hateful quotes from Scarface and Reservoir Dogs are engraved in my skull?

My wife took me to a meditation retreat a few years ago. In practicing a loving-kindness exercise I was asked to think of a memory of pure love, not sexual or romantic, but kindness. Nothing came to mind. If asked to recall a memory of anger or hatred, I could probably recall several from any given day. Maybe that’s the real problem here. Not the Nerf guns and zombie shoot ‘em up games, but the lack of love to counter balance it. I guess kindness doesn’t sell, and if it doesn’t sell, then it has no place of prominence in our society.

The twin evils of materialism and violence are all around us. We fill that emotional void with the things we buy, and when we don’t have the spending power we would like, we lash out with violence, either at ourselves or others. I see that all around me in one form or another every day, and so does my little boy.

I guess the solution needs to start with me. Not simply saying “No” to a video game or a toy, but saying “yes” to kindness and things that are not store-bought. I just don’t have much experience in that. Maybe my parents were too busy working, paying the bills, and getting by to meditate and clear our home and hearts of attractions to things that please us and aversions to things we dislike.

Maybe it just sounds silly to fill your heart with kindness. Who has time for that? I’m realizing this anger and violence is tied-up in our consumer culture where we just buy-off the pain rather than finding the root of it and plucking it out. I’m not blaming my parents or any given department store.

I left a small baby doll on our porch one morning for my son to find, hoping he would find it and care for it, practice those empathy skills. He did. He kissed it and named it and has always treated it well. He has that it in him. I’m not worried that he is a sociopath. But the baby doll doesn’t make him feel powerful the way a gun does. Building a tower is fun, but knocking it down is where the real thrill and payoff comes from. It’s too easy to shrug and call that human nature.

I get that he needs to feel powerful and conquer his fears, but dear God people, can we find some way to balance knocking things down with building thigs up? Can we make kindness a deep American value, and not just a sappy cliché relegated to greeting cards?

I don’t need another self-help book, another thing to buy and put on my shelf. They never help me for long anyway. I need us to want to help each other. I need us to care and be kind on a regular basis, not just after tragedy strikes. I need help doing that because there seems to be more anger and hate in my own heart than there is peace and love. I guess I’m seeing that reflected in my little boy, and that’s what hurts my heart so much.

It’s time to turn this boat around, for the passengers to take the wheel because the captain and crew aren’t doing their jobs. Can someone please help me figure out how to do that? Maybe a love rally, without the sex and drugs of the 60s. I’ve gotten old to talk this way, but I am a parent now after all. It has changed how I see the world. One march won’t change anything. I learned that a long time ago. It’s a daily struggle, and I can’t speak for you all, but I’m losing.

Let’s normalize love for once instead of hate. We don’t need armed guards in our schools, churches, and grocery stores to do that. Please help me normalize love, for my child and yours.

…

BR Ghent is a husband, father, and teacher in a small southern town.