Note: Just thought of this as I was about to press "Submit". This thread is not about America's gun laws. Maybe you live in America and they affect you, so I'll allow it, but that's not why I'm here. Jus' sayin'.
I've been getting a little bit worried about my nephew, lately. It started a couple months back when we went to a steam rally in Redbourn. There were some BB guns there that looked like replicas. Anyway, he saw them and got super-hyped and was begging me and my dad for money to buy one. We both obviously refused. This is nothing as a one-off thing, and I'd shrug it off if it was just that.
In the time since he's developed a sort of obsession with guns. Now I know most little boys think guns are cool - me and my mates did - but we were never obsessed by them. In 'play time', a laser gun was always seen as extremely preferential to a real life gun, haha. So anyway, my nephew has developed an interest in real guns and the military and stuff, and his reactions to violence in films and stuff is worrying.
He's ten years old, and I've seen him playing COD and going round shooting all the dead bodies and blowing them up I know what you're all going to say - "He shouldn't be playing those games and watching those films at his age", and you're right - he shouldn't. I'm not his mum, though, and since me and her always watched really adult films when we were little, she thinks nothing of it.
I see something in him that I don't recognise in myself or anyone else from my childhood, and it worries me. I think he thinks guns and war and stuff is some sort of game or something. As if he doesn't realise that they're weapons, almost. He does of course, but it's like he more closely associates guns with "games and films" than he does with "war". I think to him "war" is just something he's seen on the telly. He doesn't seem to understand the abject misery they carry in real life. He likes them.
The first thing I think about whenever I see a gun is "violence, war, gangs, etc". I think the first thing that crosses his mind are games and films.
Am I worrying about nothing?