And I used to watch Rambo at 8

I took the girl to the park the other day and while we were there another father showed up with his five-year-old son. The kid was your typically rambunctious boy – loud, excited, lots of energy. He’d brought with him to the park a toy gun. A very realistic looking toy gun. Like the kind that could get you accidentally killed by the police in the wrong situation. I was surprised they made those anymore. Don’t toy guns have to be painted bright green or something now?

I know all about playing guns when you’re a kid. My sister and I used to play a game we called “Spies” which was essentially just hide and seek with guns. And I really hate the way the pansy-girl ex-hippies have tried to ruin good harmless pretend violence. I hate how as soon as a kid uses his finger as a gun and pretends to shoot his friend in school, all of a sudden people freak out, call the principal, put the kid in counseling. I personally think we’re setting ourselves up for more disaster by NOT allowing kids to get out their aggressions in a playful manor.

But when this kid started pointing his play gun at me and the girl and making loud “POW POW” sounds, I’ll admit, something inside me said, “This is wrong.” And it didn’t stop there. The kid started shouting, “Better watch out or I’ll shoot you. Watch out or I’ll kill you.” Mind you, he was laughing the entire time. There was certainly no malicious intent behind his words. He was just playing. And I KNEW he was just playing. I was even playing back at him, pretending to be hit by a bullet when he shot me. But even so, something rubbed me very wrong about this whole situation. Especially when he ran up to other random kids and started shooting THEM.

Why did I feel that way? Have I allowed the wussy patty-cake movement of the 1990’s to infect me? Or was there something truly unique about this particular situation? Perhaps it’s simply a matter of the fact that I didn’t know this kid. He didn’t know me. He didn’t know the girl. He didn’t know any of the kids he was shooting at. I guess when I was a kid I never pretended to shoot anybody a) who I didn’t know and b) who didn’t know for certain that this was a game and they could shoot me back. We never said, “I just killed you,” to random strangers, even as we said it constantly to each other, to our friends and siblings. Maybe that’s the difference.

Man, I HOPE that’s the difference. Otherwise who knows what other core values I may have gradually turned over to the creampuff bourgeois over the last 15 years?