to think you don't let your kid shoot people in the supermarket?

[DonkeyHohtay]

Busy Saturday morning in the supermarket. Boy of about 8 with his Dad. Dad busy filling his basket and behaving perfectly normally.

Boy has a large, black plastic gun. Rifle type rather than a pistol (I'm not a gun expert). Boy is holding gun up to his shoulder, looking down the length of it, pointing it at people and saying "bang bang you're dead". When boy pointed it at me I said - perfectly politely - "Please don't point that at me, I don't like guns".

Father looked at me as if I had grown two heads.

AIBU to think that the supermarket on a busy morning isn't the place for toy guns??

Full disclosure - I'm not a gun fan. Although who is. My kids have in the past had those large "Nerf" type guns which are bright orange and could never be mistaken for a real one. The rules were always that shooting the little foam things at people was not allowed. The had hours of fun in the garden trying to hit a tree or something. This wasn't a gun like that. It was a toy gun, but a black one made to look like the real thing.

AIBU to be a wee bit shocked and think this was completely inappropriate?

8 year olds should know not to talk to strangers.

'Gun deaths that year killed almost twice as many children as cancer, which was the third-leading cause of death, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday (Dec. 20). Firearm-related injuries made up 15.4% of all childhood deaths that year, killing 3,143 kids. (Cancer caused 1,853 deaths, or just over 9% over childhood deaths. Cars killed 4,074 children.)'

My DS isn’t allowed toy weapons. At all. I lived in London for years and plan to move back in a few years when he starts school. Weapons are so horribly present in cities these days, that I refuse to allow play to normalise the unjustifiable.

Play is how children learn, before anyone starts on about “it’s just a toy/ just a game” and if we “play” that violence is acceptable, we’re undermining the general stance on weaponised violence on the streets, ie that it’s not acceptable and too many kids are dying, or wearing colostomy bags as a result of knife and gun crime.

I do wish people would use their heads.

I wouldn't be happy with my DD doing this (but then she wouldn't have been bought a gun as a toy in the first place). I think it's pretty rude to allow your kid to run up to strangers and pretend to shoot them and tell them they're dead! Baffles me a bit that anyone would be happy with their little -horror- one doing so tbh but I'm often quite amazed by what people let their kids get away with because they're just 'playing'.

Pretending that 'cowboys' and 'pirates' are and always have been wholesome fun is ridiculous.

If you want to give your kid toy guns and day AOK to pointing and firing and saying 'you're dead' to random women in the supermarket that's your lookout.

Rewriting what all this is actually referencing is bollocks though.

Pirates are and were violent criminals.

The idea that all kids dressed as pirates are emulating wholesome feminist role models is preposterous.

And painting out what cowboys was about until a few years ago is also bollocks. We all grew up with the cowboys shooting the 'Indians' who were armed with bows and arrows. Stopping sale of it as a kit doesn't remove the original gist.

8 is pretty old to not know how to behave

It still baffles me that people buy pretend guns for their children at all. “Here you go son, pretend to shoot your brother- but also be nice to him and don’t hit him or say mean things, just emulate killing him”.

Me and my brother were perfectly capable of emulating killing each other without toy guns, to be fair. Pretending the light saber is real, sending Kill Curses at each other from wands, throwing each other off "cliffs", pretending to fight to the death, throwing apples as "bombs".

We used to play Monkey Magic, anyone remember that?

Not in the supermarket though

There is absolutely no Correlation or causation between pretend play gun and gun crime.
Making such an association is spurious and has no factual basis
Participating in pretend gun play isn’t an indicator or marker that one will undertake gun crime

In uk,indications of propensity to be involved in gun crime are
Social exclusion
Poverty
Excluded from education or incomplete schooling
Belonging to a gang
Involvement in Drugs and/or organised crime

Givin it large in Waitrose is not a noted trigger for adult gun crime

Claire Much as I might like to do the pretend fall to the floor it probably would take several customers to get me back up with my knees as they are at the moment.

I saw two little angels using rolls of wrapping paper as light sabres today in Sainsburys. As the cucumber I had bought was missing when I got home they are under suspicion of liberating that to become a light sabre too.

Do people nowadays say no the their DC going to Laser Quest or paintballing birthday parties?

My kids go and have hosted
Laser quest and paint ball

I wouldn't like this for various reasons.

One is it's an intrusive game. Most children in the supermarket are not playing 'with' you, they are playing by themselves, their families, their brothers and sisters. Choosing to play is usually something you as the adult would do- a very very little child might start peek-a-boo, but most people don't want to have to play with children whilst they shop, it's not part of normal behaviour. I would be quite surprised if a child came up and started playing princesses with me and wouldn't necessarily want to pretend to be a prince. Same applies.

Taking pretend guns, even plastic ones, in public places is incredibly stupid. Yes, it probably is visibly plastic, yes, if you look long enough and the child is holding it, it's clearly pretend- but a black gun shaped object is just a stupid thing to wave around in a public place. What if the child gets bored or silly and mum or dad has to wrestle it off them? All you would need is someone far away, or someone who doesn't quite know what's going on to make a report or panic and you have a potential 'gun' sighting. I always think of that poor man who was shot carrying a table leg wrapped up.

I've never seen a child playing with a toy gun in a supermarket and I don't think it is a common thing, this type of 'interactive' game isn't very British and I don't think it'll catch on!

•It still baffles me that people buy pretend guns for their children at all. “Here you go son, pretend to shoot your brother- but also be nice to him and don’t hit him or say mean things, just emulate killing him•

Kids are quite clever little beings and are able to differentiate between imaginative play and real live violence from a surprisingly early age.

I remember 'Monkey Magic', MarshaBradyo. I wanted my own little cloud to travel about on just like his.

There are never any useful toys like that around when you want them.

As someone who lives in the US and whose two year old does shooter drills in preschool, no it’s not funny. Do you give your kids knives so they can pretend to stab each other like, somewhat like what happens weekly in London? I have zero idea why guns are used as toys and I would have been unimpressed. I am happy to be a killjoy. But living half an hour away from where Sandy Hook happened seems to have robbed me of my sense of humour in this regard.

whose two year old does shooter drills in preschool

My kids have used the following as weapons
Carrot
Cucumber
Tin foil
Wrapping paper
Apples
Banana

They of course know it’s pretend
They aren’t actually trying to purée each other to death or wrap the life out of each other

Haha me too Lying. We were doing that whistle blow thing he did a lot (and no one wanted to be pigsy)

The dc have gone to paintballing and laser quest for friends’ parties but I’d still stop a dc playing around and shooting in a supermarket for sure

Yes, My kids have pretend swords and knifes.and have worn into school on book day
Again I refer you to causation and correlation. Toy knifes don’t cause knife crime and are not an indicator that an individual will be involved in knife crime

I think letting a child take a toy gun out in this day and age is odd. Not least because there is always a chance they will be tasered/shot or whatnot by police or another nutter with a gun ‘defending themselves’, more likely in the US granted but still I would be cautious. What I have learnt in life though is that there are a lot of odd people about so a kid in the supermarket with a toy gun doesn’t surprise me in the least.

While it’s not what I would do, I wouldn’t over-react and inflame the situation either by trying to tell the child and parent they are inappropriate which is what this pretty much boils down to. I don’t understand why you couldn’t have just done an internal eye roll, grabbed a packet of biscuits, stuck them in the trolley and moved on and away from them.

My kids had nerf guns when young. Never allowed to take them out, not because of any inappropriate gun aspect but because I didn’t want to risk a drama with them ‘accidently’ firing a nerf bullet at someone. We didn’t have other toy guns but it didn’t really matter, the kids would use their hands and even sticks to play with pretend guns. However neither my kids or any others that I know that did this (basically all of them and an entire year of boys from what I observed as a parent helper on one excursion) turned out to be interested in real guns let alone go round shooting at people so all a bit pearl clutchy in my opinion.