Parenthood: Week 225 – Guns

Ollie doesn’t know what a gun is.

This struck me when we were looking through a Transformers book. In this book, there was a picture of Megatron transforming into a gun, as he originally did in his first incarnations as a toy and on the original cartoon show.

I asked him what he thought it was, and he told me that it look like a water hose, and I left it at that.

There’s a lot that Ollie knows about. He knows most of the words of “Joseph’s Coat,” from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, he can name far more dinosaurs than I can, he’s well read (in the world of children’s books), and he has learned a variety of different jumps and landings recently in gymnastics class.

There’s a lot of stuff that Ollie doesn’t know about. There are things like professional sports, which Ollie isn’t exposed to because me and wife aren’t interested in watching sports. Besides education applications on the iPad, Ollie has had little to no exposure to video games, again because that’s not really part of our lives. The television and movies that he watches are designed for his age.

Guns, hunting, firearms are not a part of our families’ culture. My parents never owned any kind of firearm. I played video games where people I controlled shot others, but at some point, it just felt weird, and I lost interest in those games. I’ve only fired a firearm once. It was a low caliber rifle at one of Diana’s uncle’s house. I felt an immediate power, a rush of adrenaline, and a feeling of strength. However something about this didn’t feel right. It was too much power, for too little effort, and there was just too much of a chance, even in that very safe, controlled environment for something to go wrong.

I loved watching action movies as a kid with my dad. As much as I loved the James Bond films, something about the way Jackie Chan disarmed people he fought and chose to fight hand to hand, seemed cooler than just shooting someone. I loved comics growing up and my favorite superhero, Batman, hated guns.

This is my lived experience that I bring with me when I’ve dealt with the issue of guns with my son. At some point, I will need to educate him about guns in American culture and the history of firearms in world history. Even with the recent tragedy in Las Vegas, the moment doesn’t seem right. I’m not ready to talk to him about guns, and he doesn’t need to know about them right now.

I’ve seen kids younger than Ollie running around playground, making gun shape hand signs and shooting at each other. Thankfully whenever Ollie encounters this, he just doesn’t get it and doesn’t care to play that game.  A couple months ago, I saw kid who must have been younger than Ollie looking over his mother’s shoulder as she was paying a parking meter. As I walked by, he pointed the gun gesture he made with his hand and play shot at me with sound effects, and the mom did nothing. I see older kids running around with Nerf guns, shooting at each other, and I get it as someone who had Nerf guns as a kid (who turned out just fine), and I feel sad.

Ollie’s been really into bad guys and good guy as he processes the concept of good and bad. All he gets is that bad guys aren’t very nice and aren’t good at sharing. Yes, he has Transformers, but I’ve only let him delve into the Rescue Bot toys and cartoon, which has no bad guys, no guns, and is all about teamwork and community building.

With the coming of our second child and Ollie asks about reproduction, I tell him the right anatomical terms. He’s knows the word "vagina," "penis," and other terms.  However when we listen to Hamilton and he hears a gunshot and he thinks it’s a firework, I don’t correct him. I just don’t need him to know about guns right now. Kid’s should not have any illusions about the human body, but about guns, I'm okay with that.

I don’t talk to Ollie about guns because the history and issue surrounding guns are complicated and too difficult for his mind to understand right now. It’s the same reason Ollie has no idea who the 45th President is (though, he is well aware of Pres. Obama).  If I were to tell Ollie anything about guns now, it would be to simply say that they are dangerous, only policemen should have them, and to never touch one. 

Am I sheltering Ollie? Yes. That’s okay. It’s our job as parents to unveil the world to our children, carefully, and deliberately. In this work, we have to keep things away from them. And yes, at a certain point, you can’t keep certain things away from your children.  But I’m not there yet with my son.

While my intellect is looking forward to the challenge of explaining the complexity of guns in our society to my son, my heart is sad thinking about the horrors that I will knowingly have to expose to my son in this conversation.

Maybe when my son is of age to have these conversations about guns, there will be a happy ending. The tragedies will be a thing of the past. More than ever, I hope for this to be true. There’s precious little that I enjoy in my life, that I consider as being fundamentally American, that I would not sacrifice for a happy ending to our never-ending national story about gun violence.