Pistol Packin'
by
Jeff Stimpson
Jill went into Target with Ned, which means she
had to come out with something made of plastic that cost about a
dollar. She and he chose a pale-green squirt gun, with a bright
orange plug where you put in the water. Ned brought it home and
started pointing it at people. "Phew phew!" he says, mimicking
gunfire. I think once he mimicked the whine of a ricochet.
Jill doesn't have a problem with this. Never
thought I'd be a squeamish parent when it came to a touchy subject
like guns -- of all subjects, not guns -- but I don't like Ned
pointing his gun at people.
And I grew up with guns. On the wall of the room
where I slept as a child in Maine was a bolt-action shotgun, and a
Winchester knock-off 30-30 ("the deer rifle"). They hung high on the
wall, out of my reach, and it never occurred to me try to get them
down any more than I'd plant my hand on top of the kitchen stove in
January, or go down to the cellar and stick my foot in the furnace.
My best friend's room when I was growing up was at the top of the
narrow stairs in his house, and to get there I had to pass within
inches of a single-shot breech-loading 10-gauge and a German sniper
rifle his dad got after World War II. Somebody in my childhood also
had a pump-gun, and my big brother had numerous .22's, and pistols.
(So why'd he have to study karate so he could really protect
himself from me?)
"My god," marvels Jill at this inventory. She grew
up in New York City, where the populace usually doesn't run across
shotguns outside of 7-11s or liquor stores.
Before age 12, I had treasured toy guns: a cool
metal Luger; a plastic M-1 that I ruined with glossy green model
paint; a plastic M-16 that was never the same after I broke it in
half; a beloved wood and metal Kentucky cap rifle; a long silver cap
gun revolver; and, at one point, a phaser made of old boards. I
mimicked my own gunfire, ricochets a specialty. When I was 12, my
cousins gave me a real gun: a muzzle-loading, .45-cal.
percussion-cap pistol. It was the kind of weapon that a trained
Napoleonic infantryman could load and fire three times in a minute;
my average was three rounds in an hour. But Jesus did it fire, with
a roar and a cloud of foul white black-powder smoke, shooting a
bullet the size of a small thimble. I used to go into the woods and
blow holes in army men, the six-inch-tall ones. Everything was
bigger in those days.
My cousins thought guns were like hot stoves, too,
and believed that kids wouldn't shoot themselves and others
accidentally if they were taught by parents that real guns were to
be left hanging on the wall except if adults were around. Period.
Guns, of course, have long been one of those
subjects from which parents feel they must shield their kids.
Another, and closely related, is violent television. I never
believed that TV influences kids to act nuts until Ned spent about
an hour rolling around as if shot after watching an especially
violent "Star Trek." Ditto raucous westerns on AMC; we won't take
him to the new Spiderman movie. We're not wild about him watching
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, even though there were no guns
in Arthurian England and even though he does endearingly call it
"the bucket movie," because of the armored helmets.
"'Band of Brothers!'," Ned demands every Monday,
at about a quarter to nine. "'Band of Brothers!'" I'm sure he likes
this violent history of the 101st Airborne only because I've taken
to the show, and after all it is history. It's also soldiers
flying around, and being vociferous about why they don't like what's
causing them to fly around. I watched World War II stories when I
was pretty young -- my brother hogged the TV during "Rat Patrol" --
but for some reason I think that Ned's too young to watch war.
Incidentally, I hope he stays that way long past draft age.
Guns aren't going away. Ned wants another one for
the playground, a fat pistol you fill with soap and pull the trigger
to make clouds of bubbles. I guess I'm more okay with this, except
that Ned wants the bubble gun with the clown face on the front.
That's scary.
Copyright 2003 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
