UNLESS you plan to stop watching TV altogether next week, you will be seeing a lot of news stories marking the one-year anniversary of Columbine.
And you will again have to answer the barrage of questions from your kids: Why did these boys shoot at their friends? Why is that Mommy crying?
One year later, America still can’t cope with kids and guns.
Just this week, school district officials in New Jersey suspended a six-year-old kindergartner for playing cops and robbers on the playground. Junior was pretending his finger was a gun, so he was sent home with no school for three days – where he probably watched “Cops” on TV.
“We’re very firm on weapons and threats,” said district Supt. William L. Bauer. And, apparently, fingers.
NY1 aired another story recently on guns and kids. It began with the police shooting of two Brooklyn gang members on April Fool’s Day. The teens tried to hold up two undercover cops with toy guns.
The follow-up report was about how police were cracking down on toy gun sales in Brooklyn. Some 700 toy guns were confiscated in a two-day sweep.
The cops displayed for the cameras a dazzling array of toy pistols – all shapes and sizes – all artfully packaged in cellophane.
It was like an infomercial for Kids ‘R Us artillery.
“I want one of those,” my four-year-old said, the same way he asked for Hot Wheels racers.
Of course he wanted one. Boys love weapons. (But not all of them are dumb enough to wrap them in black tape and wave them in front of drug traffickers.)
I phoned an old friend in Virginia. The highly educated, religiously conservative and eminently practical mother of three forbids her kids, aged two to seven, from watching television.
“TV doesn’t make a particle of difference on the gun question,” she told me while her kids screamed healthily over dinner in the background. Apparently, someone’s ketchup had crossed the border and touched the corn – and there was hell to pay.
My friend admitted her two sons’ curiosity couldn’t be any more intense if they did watch TV.
“Interest in weapons is natural to at least one of the two sexes,” she said. “And I concluded that because we haven’t introduced it – and it’s taken over” anyway.
“Turning off the TV has a lot of advantages but doesn’t save them there,” said my Virginia mom.
Shut off the TV and your kid picks up aggressive behavior at school. School your kid at home and, in a single afternoon spent with an older cousin, they return gleefully extolling the virtues of guns and killing.
Bang, bang, you’re dead.
So what do I say to my son when he wants that shrink-wrapped toy gun on TV?
So far, I’ve said nothing. I chickened out. I ignored his request as if he’d seen an ad for a Barbie Dream House, something that will be forgotten when the next commercial creates a new desire.
But I can’t get away with that for long.
I have already bought him water pistols. Then we graduated to silver cowboy cap guns which he received with the most effusive, “Mommy, they’re what I’ve always wanted.”
Next week, when we watch the Littleton mothers weep over their lost children, I’ll have to tell him that toy guns are toys. But real guns are as dangerous as running into the street against a red light or riding without a seatbelt.
Boys will be boys – but good boys know the difference between real and make-believe, between life and TV.
They know because they learn it from their parents.
Now I just have to figure out how to do that.