debbie m. price

What is it with kids and their guns?

David wants a gun. He has wanted one for as long as I can remember, or at least since he could talk.

David is 3 1/2. "Gun" and "shoot Trammell" appeared in his lexicon shortly after "Mom" and "Dad" and "no." Trammell is the cat and really should be shot, but that is beside the point.

David's parents have no idea where he got this fascination with guns. Television is forbidden. Nothing stronger than The Little Mermaid plays on videos, which David watches by the hour when he isn't running around with his orange plastic golf clubs, pretending to shoot Trammell.

Sticks, a saxophone, spatulas, wooden spoons in David's hands become guns. Bang, bang. You're dead.

David, we tell him, you would be very sad if we were dead. It's not nice to say that you're going to kill someone. And when that fails, David, go to time out.

But still he wants to shoot.

And he wants a gun with which to shoot.

Not just any gun. He has a pink plastic ray gun which spits light and sound — ack, ack, ack, brrrrrr, bing, bing, bing — until his mother is wild. It holds no interest for him.

He wants a real gun, shiny and steel, like T.J.'s. T.J. has a pair of six-shooters. At T.J.'s house, they race across the lawn, shooting cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, whatever comes into their sights. They gallop on imaginary horses and shoot with imaginary bullets, fall down dead to hop up and play some more.

Is there harm in that?

I asked David in my best Santa Claus voice what he wants for Christmas. He won't come to the phone for Aunt Debbie, but for Santa Claus, well, he speaks with clarity and resolution.

A cowboy hat and boots and, without hesitation, he said, a gun.

And what would you do with a gun?

Shoot monsters, he said. The child understands far more than he knows.

A lot of us keep guns around for just that reason, just in case. But the monsters, too, have guns and all too often, nowadays, they are — at least in the eyes of the law — children.

It is hardly news anymore when police find guns, real ones, in backpacks and lockers. Teen-agers pump the houses of their enemies and sometimes their recent friends with bullets, and in the process, they kill.

Last summer a Euless teen, scared by the crowd of taunting teens outside his door, went not for the police or an adult but for a gun. And when he fired, he wounded a boy and now has gone on trial and been acquitted, but not before causing all kinds of anguish for his family, the wounded boy and his family, and for, most surely, himself.

A premed TCU student, recent high school graduate and honor student, is found shot to death, a .38 in her waistband.

And on and on and on it goes.

Where does it start? Where do children cross the line from make-believe to real?

Once upon a time and not so long ago, there was no debate. Toy guns were, like toy trains, for fun and play and everybody knew the difference. GI Joe was a doll and you could pull his arms off in battle, blow him up with firecrackers, drowned him in the bathtub, but you did not dare do that to your little brother.

But now with violence — gun violence by children — at epidemic proportions, even the TootsieToy American West six-shooter is suspect.

What's Santa Claus to do?

We went shopping in the Stockyards area for the cowboy outfit. And at each store, there were pistols and rifles sealed in plastic for ages 4 and up.

We passed them by, resolutely, gripped by conscience, until we saw him, the little cowboy swaggering down Exchange Avenue. He was wearing his boots and hat, his chaps and vest. Slung low on his hips were a pair of six-shooters.

And he tapped the white grips of his silver pistols with such confidence and pride that Santa Claus, who will always err on the side of making a kid happy, ducked into the drug store and bought a gun.

Now we are keeping the gun for Santa Claus while we decide during our own little Brady bill waiting period what to do with it, come Christmas.

Debbie M. Price is executive editor of the Star-Telegram.

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