Guns, Mental Health and Play

Abstract

As a parent, I still remember my shock when my four-year-old daughter told me that she wanted to have a gun (toy of course) and when I probed into the reason for this request, she said it was because the other neighborhood children had been “shooting her.” So I did agree to buy her a gun (a little silver-colored one) and she then went out to see her playmates and she “shot” every one of them. I don’t think she ever played with the gun again, but her pretend ‘playful’ response had served its purpose! (She did not grow up to be a criminal but rather a newspaper reporter, travel writer, and now a florist!) As a developmental psychologist,
however, I have often pondered what the possession of toy guns has signaled to children in our society and, of course, I am still trying to understand the motives of those young (and sometimes older) adults who take real guns and randomly shoot people in a store, school, office, or airport! Do they have a motive similar to the one my daughter had? That is, do they feel that the people in their environment might try to kill them (at least psychologically)? Do they feel the world is so dangerous to them that they must show they are able to be the actors of violence rather than the
recipients of violence? Or do they think it is all pretend, as my daughter and her playmates did?