what do we think of little boys playing with toy guns?

[headfairy]

I've always been very anti it. Dh won ds a prize at a fair we went to once and he let ds choose a gun which I was furious about, dh said I was being precious but ds spent the next few days pointing the gun at everyone "shooting" them saying he was going to kill them I "lost" the gun pretty soon after that.

Our nanny bought ds a few little bits for his dressing up box recently, he loves being policemen and firemen and she bought him a walkie talkie, a face mask and (it must have been part of a set) a gun that fires plastic darts that have sucker bits on the end (there's also a metal bit behind the plastic sucker which makes them pretty hard when fired at someone which he did all the time). He's only just four and I think they're inappropriate toys so I "lost" that gun too.

Am I being a bleeding heart liberal or are toy guns the root of all evil?

I had a toy gun when I was young. I needed it to be one of the Charlie's angel with DSS
I would not necessarily encourage my DS to have a toy gun but would not stop him having one if he wanted one. One can "teach" violence to children by many other means than toy guns.
A couple of toy guns in the midst of all the other toys, surely is not a big deal.
I think that watching violent TV or youtube clips or playing war video games is far worse for children.

I can only see that the parents that ban it are the ones glamorising it. With 3DS we have an impressive collection of (toy) weapons. It's perfectly normal and my kids are far from aggressive.

I haven't read whole thread so sorry if this has already been said but there is a book called We don't play with guns here, which is all about this. Looks at when and why we stopped allowing guns and weapon related play in schools, and why we should let them.
It's funny as a teacher I felt strongly that children should be allowed, mainly as otherwise the adults spent such a lot of time stopping the children, and the children would just very quickly learn to pretend that their Lego gun was actually a phone/machine etc. but I have found it trickier as a mum, but still feel its my job to support DS's play and use the opportunities to explain about the dangers etc of real weapons.
Ps foam tubes for insulating pipes are cheap and make for injury free sword fighting x

when my ds1 was little i was all no toy guns, he just made them out of lego or bit his toast into a gun shapre or used his fingers, i now have 4 boys and we have a variety of toy guns, swords, light sabers, nerf guns, water pistols etc. they know how to play with them nicely/safely and they are taken away if not.

i quite like nerf guns tbh they are good fun an dds2 has a huge range of 'army' toys including a camo outfit and various small soldiers, and vehicles etc and they boys spend ages building 'bases' and command centres and pretending to have battles etc. all sorts gets ued from wooden blocks to lego to the toy cooker, they are using their imagination and having fun.

i had a bow and arrow etc as a child and ds2 bought himself a bow and arrow recentlyhe knows it is for outside and not to shoot AT anyone.

i agree that swords and lightsabers are far more dangerous for them to actually play with as there is a good chance they can hit/hurt each other, we solved that problem with a bubble machine, they can 'fight' and pop the bubbles and not hit each other :)

oh and my dd is 19mths old and already makes the right noises for a guns etc and when she sees a picture of thundercats she will hold her arm up as tho holding up the sword of omens and say 'hoooooo'