Every night for the past week, my seven-year-olds been shooting his plastic and foam bow-and-arrow set in the backyard.

He’ll shoot, and then watch in awe as it soars across the lawn or collides with a tree trunk. After that, he runs as fast as he can to pick the arrow up from wherever it’s landed to do it all over again another fifty times.

Watching him, I reflect on how there’s something primal about aiming, firing and witnessing contact. We have no weapons in our home, but I’ve felt that satisfaction in my bones myself, whether it’s involved an arrow and a target, a rock and a pond, a baseball and a mitt, or even a peach pit and a trash can.

“Now don’t point that at anybody,” my visiting mother-in-law instructs. “And make sure you never leave it loaded.”

Fair enough, I think. I’ve said the same thing to him myself. But somehow that falls apart when I think of the squirt guns of summer or the new potato gun I just bought him. That stream of cold water or the little pop of potato pellet from a few feet away can be downright exciting.

My mother-in-law continues, “Kids have killed each other with weapons before because they shoot a weapon that’s been set and they’ve pulled the trigger and surprised themselves that it’s killed their friend.”

Okaaaay, I think, a little over-the-top. He’s playing with a plastic and foam bow-and-arrow. For crying out loud, he still calls it a bone-and-arrow.

But maybe that’s the point.

Maybe every game of shooting should be brought back to the bigger picture: that there are weapons that are designed to hurt or destroy. Naiveté can be deadly if ever in the presence of the authentic.

I think back to another seven-year-old I knew in grade school. Her name was Dawn. Her single mother left her and her kindergarten-age sister, Tonya, alone while she went on a date after they went to bed. The girls woke up around midnight, frightened by a noise. To protect them, Dawn retrieved the hidden gun. While cocking it, she accidentally killed her sister with a single shot to the stomach.

Now, as an adult, I can see there are plenty of problems with that scenario. But, when I was eight, what struck me most was that Dawn came back to school after that, a shadow of herself: a quiet and pale ghost who sat at the edge of the swing sets sifting pebbles through her hands. She tried to fit in again, but somehow she never did.

She had killed someone.

So, yes, I think to myself with a silent nod to Grammy, you can teach my boy about weapon safety, even if it’s with something that’s not lethal, just loud. And I can know I’m walking a fine line, letting him play with toy weapons at all. But I can accept that responsibly and teach him what he needs to know.

And I can pray to God he never puts his hands on anything that could inflict damage, but if he does, at least he knows the rules.

By Anjie Reynolds

Labels: Anjie Reynolds

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