It has been a long time since I have shared a van ride with more than one or two 10-year-old boys. I remember the days when my kids were that age and had birthday parties. The car would rock with excitement. I forgot how much fun it is listening to the conversations of excited 10-year-old boys.

The occasion was a 10th birthday party. We had the privilege of attending. The destination was a go-cart race track. I spent 30 minutes in the van listening to the laughter and conversation of 10-year-olds. I positioned myself in the second row of the van to keep order so we didn’t rock the van off the road by distracting the driver.

I expected the conversation to center around video games since electronic devices take up the time and brains of 10-year-olds these days. At least that had been my observation. However, the conversation centered on Nerf guns and other toy guns. I listened as the boys told of battles fought with their toy guns.

I remember spending hours when I was young playing cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians. I am sorry I do not mean to be politically incorrect or unaware that these terms probably are no longer acceptable, but I can’t change my history. That is what we played in the “olden” days. We had silver cap guns. We didn’t have sub machine guns and guns that spit out rounds of fake bullets, one at one time. We didn’t have bullets that shot out of the gun. We had caps we put in the gun.

We shot the bad guys but we didn’t just break out shooting everyone for the fun of it. We took our games of taking out the bad guys seriously. Of course you must remember on television in those days that they shot the bad guys, they fell to the ground and we had no blood or gore. For some reason, and it must have been our mom and dads, we knew it was play and we would not point guns at anyone in real life. I have to say I don’t think I saw a real gun until I was in my middle years of school and then took gun training to learn how to use the gun for hunting.

My kids had toy guns, but not many, as I didn’t like guns and I didn’t feel I wanted to promote the fact that using guns was fun. That was my view. Did we have real guns in the house? Yes, we did, in fact my son had a rifle for hunting. He had adults that taught him the proper use for a gun. For some reason, and I can’t tell you what it was, I never worried about him owning that gun because I always saw the respect given the danger of using it the wrong way.

That leads me back to the toy guns of today. I have mixed feelings about them. The guns with the soft bullets are fun to use. They can be trained on someone and that person can be hit by the soft bullets and not be hurt. It is fun to play when you actually have a machine gun type of play gun that spits out soft bullets hitting a human target. Let me tell you when you have many 10-year-old boys each having one of these soft bullet machine guns, and shooting them at their friends, the room can get crazy.

As I listened to the conversation, I asked the question of the boys that day that was uppermost in my mind, “What is so fascinating with you guys about guns.” The answers were varied. “Just for play, fun to see if you can hit your target, something to do-the bullets don’t hurt anyone so it is safe.” I suspected some of them didn’t know why it was so much fun.

A couple of answers from one young man that I had just met troubled me. His answer was, “To kill things.” This young man in his excitement told me he thought it would be fun to take a fake gun and play a joke on a policeman and point it at him. My eyes got wide and I asked why he would do that. His answer was, “It would just be a joke.” It was clear to me and the others in the car that this young man had no concept as to how a joke like that would play out in the real world.

I explained that it would be no joke because the policeman would not know the gun was not real and the young man could himself be shot. His answer was, “But it would just be a joke, fun to do.”

Another adult in the car got involved in the conversation and also explained more consequences. I do not know if we made our point and he understood what we were telling him about playing jokes with a fake gun. I do think that when he answered that guns are to kill things, he had no concept of the consequences. I do not know this boy. I do not know the adults in his life. I can’t help but wonder how many other boys his age are out there with the same thought processes; without the understanding of real life consequences. I had the feeling his ideas were formed by the media he has been involved with.

I learned so much from those 10-year-old boys. I loved watching them race. I love their enthusiasm for life. I loved the respect they showed for me. I loved the conversations we had that day. I came away from our conversation about guns with this conclusion: With all the media glorifying the violence in television and movies, with all the real violence with guns in our own world, it is hard for kids to understand that using a gun is a privilege and comes with responsibility unless they have responsible adults monitoring them, and having conversations between the differences of play and responsible use of the real thing.

Having that conversation between an adult and a child might someday save someone’s life.

 

Wells resident Julie Seedorf’s column appears every Monday. Send email to her at hermionyvidaliabooks@gmail.com. Her Facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/julie.