Guns made from Legos. Apparently this is a controversial issue:
This is all true, but U.K. father Jon Trew brings up another important point: Could these toy guns confuse children into thinking it’s OK to play with real guns? “Whatever side of the argument you are on, no one in their right mind would want encourage children to play with realistic models just in case they came across a real one and thought they could play with it in the same way,†Trew says.
With several centuries of young kids playing with toy guns, it’s amazing the human race has survived! Maybe it’s not so much the barbarians at the gates that make civilization’s fall, but the civilized people inside them. Kids that learn proper use and respect for firearms eventually become people who can man the gates when barbarians come knocking. It’s the people who wish to beat every martial instinct out of humankind are the ones who fell civilizations.
Not hundreds of centuries of playing with toy guns. Perhaps that many centuries playing with toy weapons.
We haven’t had firearms for hundreds of years? Or were toy guns not around?
Hahaha… OK… I read what I meant, not what I wrote. I was going to say hundreds of years, and decided to switch to centuries, but never backed over the part I meant to discard.
Playing with weapons did not fail civilizations. It’s usually when people are too removed from weaponry and ways of war did their civilization fell.
When I was growing up in a communist country few decades back, the ONLY toy I and most boys really really wanted was a gun. You don’t need to play around with toy guns to facilitate that desire when all you have is people controlling most aspects of your life.
The only gun-related items we as kids were able to find were Mauser clips [yes, clips] with a few bullets.
I’ll tell one of my Old Stories that (I hope) illustrates that by exposure to real guns, kids easily learn the differences from toy ones in an important way.
I started prowling the rural fields of Bucks County with a real .22 when I was about seven — back in the early ’50s. Because I always had a rifle available, a few years later many of my townie friends would pilfer .22 ammo from the hardware store and bring it out to our place to shoot in my rifle.
One day someone pilfered a box of .22 blanks. Someone got the idea that we could play soldiers or cowboys using blanks in the .22 like they would use a cap gun. I quickly found that I absolutely could not point a real gun at someone and pull the trigger, and I put the kibosh on that idea. My buddies thought I was a real wet blanket, but the danger was obvious. Most importantly my conditioning just wouldn’t allow it.
I guess it sounds horrifying today for a gang of pre-teens to be running around unsupervised with real guns, but it wasn’t all that unusual back then. And at that I was continuing a tradition started by my father and uncles when they were kids in Philadelphia, and could walk or ride their bicycles down the street with a .22, to go shooting “down The Neck” south of the city, where the sports stadiums are now, and no one including the cops thought a thing of it.
I used my dad’s 22 rifle as part of my Halloween soldier costume a couple of years, back in the late 60’s, nobody really thought anything of it! Nowadays the first house you go to would probably lock the door and call the cops!
Ah, someone has done what I’ve kindof wanted to do for a while now! I’m glad to see that the idea is taking off, too.
I find the notion that “Legos can’t be used for WEAPONS!!!11!1!!!1!11” hysteria rather funny. Legos are made to build whatever you wish to build. If that imagination takes you to building guns or fighter jets, well, the bricks are like the atoms that make them up: individually, they have not much form at all, but when put together, they become what the individual wants them to become.
I’m fairly confident that the plants that became the oil that was used to make the plastics for that brick never thought to themselves “some day, I’m going to be processed and made into a Lego brick. How aweful! And even worse, that brick is going to be made into a WEAPON!” Yet that is what’s happening.
The company that makes Lego bricks would be a lot better off if they just said, “We do not endorse building guns out of bricks, but if that what sparks your imagination, then go for it! Legos are for sparking the imagination.”
And, to address the fears of all those who say “Well, what’s going to happen when a kid points one of these at a cop? Someone’s going to die!”, that Lego spokesperson should add, “And remember: a realistic-looking gun, even if it isn’t real, is enough to give someone enough reasonable fear to justifiably shoot you in self defense. So, for safety, DO NOT point ANY gun that can be reasonably believed to be real, at another person.”
This notion that we can just ban “realistic-looking” guns, as these Legos prove is just silly. We need to teach proper gun safety, and basic principles of self defense, instead.