Posted by
nhoop on Friday, December 28, 2012 5:48:01 PM
After Newtown , some parents impose (toy) gun controlDec. 27, 2012 at 7:20 AM ET
As the nation debates gun policy following the mass shooting in Newtown , Conn. , some parents are imposing a different kind of gun control in their own homes: They are taking away their children’s toy guns.
One Chicago mother, Anupy Singla, had been wrestling for months with whether to keep the Nerf revolver-style blasters that her daughters, ages 7 and 10, enjoyed playing with, several times tossing them into the trash and then retrieving them.
Her indecision ended abruptly on Dec. 14, as she watched the coverage of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School , where 20-year-old gunman Adam Lanza killed 26 people and himself after fatally shooting his mother at home.
“It was just something that inside me really snapped,” said Singla, 44, a cookbook author and food writer, and she threw the playthings away.
“It’s me making a decision that this is not something that’s right in our house,” she said. “We don’t believe in playing with something that represents something that could be potentially so dangerous.”
Though experts say that simply playing with a toy gun doesn’t mean a child will become violent, other families, too, were moved by tragedy to weed out their toy chests.
Face it; we are human beings from ancestors who had to fight to live. This show up in small children. Ever see a small kid whack his brother or sister? It's perfectly natural, and easily (and eventually) overcome by rational parenting. So one in a million grow up thinking murder.
There's little we can do to correct this. Certainly, disarming rational gun owners is not the answer.