Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Guns for Tots
By Frida Berrigan
Posted on July 31, 2016, Printed on July 31, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176170/ ;
I remember well going to the rodeo at Madison Square Garden in New York City
with my six-guns proudly strapped to my hips. I was probably eight or nine
years old and those two ivory-handled -- okay, undoubtedly plastic --
revolvers were probably from a Hopalong Cassidy line of toys. That cowboy
character was a favorite of mine on TV and, of course, with my friends I
regularly played "cowboys and Indians." But far more of my war play --
we're talking the early 1950s -- came out of World War II, my father's war,
even though the country was then involved in a bloody stalemate of a
conflict in Korea.
Imagine me, an eight or nine year old, running through the potato fields
behind a friend's house on Long Island. The year is probably 1952. America
is enmeshed in its second Asian war of the century, this time against -- to
a child -- a horrific but blurry enemy. Fortunately, the fighting that goes
on and on in a faraway land called Korea is unimaginably distant from this
moment. My friend and I crouch down, furrowed dirt and leafy potato plants
as far as the eye can see. The two of us scan the horizon. Somewhere out
there the enemy is approaching -- not the one in Korea, but a real enemy,
the "Japs" or Nazis ("Japanazis," as World War II comic books sometimes
called them) or maybe even those Indians. The choice is ours. No parents
nearby to tell us what to do, no teachers to instruct us, and we're armed.
I grip a stick. I can feel the curve where it fits into my palm, and what
more do I need than a good eye, the ability to make battle sounds -- the
sharp rat-a-tat of a machine gun, the budda-budda of ack-ack fire, or the
long whistle of incoming artillery? We've been at this for an hour already,
beating back attack after attack, then diving for our "foxholes" between the
rows of plants. "Watch out!" my friend shouts as loud as he wants, because
no one cares that we, and the invisible but palpable enemy, are here at war
in these fields. Yes, I notice it now, too: the faint motion of leaves that
might pass for the wind. It's them! A banzai charge! We leap up, firing
madly, but with deadly accuracy. The enemy begins to fall.
It was all so obvious to us then, millions of kids whose fathers had come
home, often grim and silent, from a terrible world war. Films glorifying
that war were a commonplace of our lives. The good guys and the bad guys
were clear. We could be left to our own devices because who should die and
why seemed so obvious, not only to us but to the adults around us. The world
of American war was, in fact, already growing increasingly complicated and,
more than a decade later, many of us would find ourselves in the streets in
opposition to just such a war, but we didn't have to worry about such things
then. What, I wonder now, thinking about TomDispatch regular Frida
Berrigan's latest essay on her children and our world, goes on in the junior
version of gun culture these days? What script or scripts are today's
children playing off of? How do zombies, terrorists, space aliens, and god
knows who or what else sort themselves out at the point of a gun when kids
begin to go pow-pow in 2016? What exactly are they powing in a world too
strange for words, one armed to the teeth and ready to kill right here at
home in ways inconceivable in 1952? In a world littered with dead bodies
from Orlando and St. Paul to Baton Rouge, Dallas, and Nice, not to speak of
Baghdad, Kabul, Tripoli, and Istanbul, in a world of drone assassinations
and god knows what else, what can they possibly be playing? Tom
"Pow, Pow, Yous Are Dead!"
Children, Toy Guns, and the Real Thing
By Frida Berrigan
It was a beautiful evening and the kids -- Madeline, two; Seamus, almost
four; and Rosena, nine -- were running across a well-tended town green.
Seamus pointed his rainbow flag with the feather handle at his sisters and
"pow-powed" them, calling out, "Yous are dead now, guys. I shot yous."
Madeline and Rosena laughed and just kept on running, with Seamus at their
heels. I hid my face in my hands. It wasn't just that he was playing guns,
but that he was using a Pride flag as his gun at a vigil to mourn those
killed at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. My pacifist husband
Patrick ran to redirect their activities, replacing the flag with a ball and
glove and beginning a game of catch. Vigil organizers were taking turns
reading the names of those killed into a microphone.
"... Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22
Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36
Luis S. Vielma, 22..."
Those three men and 46 others were massacred on June 12th. Another 50 people
were wounded. Omar Mateen, who killed them, was armed with a Sig Sauer MCX
assault rifle and a Glock 17 9mm semi-automatic pistol. He bought those two
weapons legally in the days leading up to the attack.
The carnage brought politicians and pundits out in force, using all the
usual arguments for and against guns. Because the victims were mostly gay
and mostly Latino, and because the attack was carried out by an American
citizen with an ethnic last name who may have been enthralled by Islamic
terrorism, or a closeted, self-hating homosexual (or both), the commentary
quickly became muddled. Was it a hate crime, Islamic terrorism, or a strange
double-bonus hit for the haters? Mateen was killed in a shootout with police
and so can't speak to his motives. Investigators were left to sift through
the material evidence and a dizzying compilation of online comments,
Facebook likes, and recollections from old co-workers, family members, and
possible lovers in their search for answers.
The most essential facts are, however, not that complicated: Mateen had a
license to carry a gun, training as a private security guard, and hatreds to
act upon. He armed himself and he killed.
And all over the country, since that fateful day that elicited the usual
cries of "never again," the killing continues: Alton Sterling and Philando
Castille by the police; Dallas Area Rapid Transit Police Officer Brent
Thompson and four Dallas Police officers, Lorne Ahrens, Michael Smith,
Michael Krol, and Patrick Zamarripa, by a lone sniper, Micah Johnson, who
himself was then killed by an armed police robot; three more police officers
in Baton Rouge on July 17th.
"... Montrell Jackson, 32
Matthew Gerald, 41
Brad Garafola, 45..."
And the killing continues. Using the Gun Violence Archive, I counted another
306 deaths by guns throughout the United States in the first eight days of
July alone. Most of them weren't high-profile police shootings or mass
tragedies, but in a small-scale and localized way, the grief and outrage of
Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas were replicated in every corner of this
country, including Ticfaw, Louisiana; Woodland, California; Tabernacle, New
Jersey; and Harvey, Illinois. More than 300 deaths by gun in just eight
days.
"Stabbin' My Bunny": Teaching Kids About Guns and Violence
And then, of course, there were my kids, my husband, and those "guns." As a
boy, Patrick wasn't allowed to play with toy guns. Instead, he, his parents,
and their friends would go to the mall during the Christmas buying spree to
put "Stop War Toys" stickers on Rambo and G.I. Joe action figures. When he
went to his friends' houses, he had to tell them that war toys were
verboten.
I grew up in a similar family of activists. We, too, were forbidden toy
guns and other war toys. My brother and I were more likely to play games
like "protester at the Pentagon" than cops and robbers. I've been thinking
recently about why toy guns didn't have a grip on our imaginations as kids.
I suspect it was because we understood -- were made to understand -- what
the big gun of U.S. militarism had done in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Indochina,
and throughout Central America. Our dad had seen the big gun of war up close
and personal. His finger -- the same one he pointed at us when we were in
trouble -- had pulled the trigger again and again in France during World War
II. He was decorated there, but had zero nostalgia for the experience. He
was, in fact, deeply ashamed of the dashing figure he had once cut when home
from the front. And so, dad screwed up a new kind of courage to say no to
war and violence, to killing of any kind. His knowledge of war imbued his
nonviolent peace activist mission with a genuine, badass, superhero style
swagger.
Our parents -- our community of ragtag, countercultural Catholic peace
activists -- made that no-violence, no-killing, no-matter-what point again
and again. In fact, my early experience of guns was the chilling fear of
knowing that, in protest, my father, mother, and their friends were walking
into what they called "free fire zones" on military bases, where well-armed,
well-trained soldiers were licensed to kill intruders. So we didn't point
toy guns at each other. We didn't pow-pow with our fingers or sticks. We
crossed those fingers and hoped that the people we loved would be safe.
Our inner city Baltimore neighborhood, where crack cocaine madness was just
taking hold, drove that point home on a micro level. Our house was robbed at
gunpoint more than once -- and we had so little worth taking. We watched a
man across the street bleed to death after being stabbed repeatedly in a
fight over nothing. People from our house ran to help and were there for far
too long before an ambulance even arrived. We knew as little kids that
violence was no laughing matter, nor child's play. It was serious business
and was to be resisted.
As parents tend to do, Patrick and I are passing this tradition on to our
kids, hopefully without the emotional scarring that went with our childhoods
of resistance. They don't have guns or action figures or any other toy
implements of death. Still, we've been watching Seamus, our Team Elsa (from
the Disney blockbuster Frozen) son, as he's recently begun turning every
stick into an imaginary gun. This is, of course, happening just as, in the
headlines of the moment, actual guns are turning so many previously real
people into statistics. Under the circumstances, how could I not find myself
thinking about toy guns, real guns, the nature of play, the role of
imagination, the place of parents, and how to (or whether to) police (ha!)
that imaginary play?
When my stepdaughter Rosena was about four, she found a toy dagger at the
playground, somehow smuggled it home, and was stabbing one of her beloved
stuffed animals, a bunny, repeatedly with it.
In the other room, I could hear the thumps on the bedroom floor and called
out, "What are you doing?"
"Stabbin' my bunny. I kilt her," she responded matter-of-factly.
Seizing a "teaching moment" and undoubtedly gripped by my own childhood
experiences and memories of my parents, I blustered into the bedroom with a
shoebox. "Now, your bunny is dead," I announced in my version of
over-the-top momism. "You know what happens when living things die, right?
It's forever, right? Now, we have to bury her." Rosena and I then "buried"
the doll on a high shelf in her closet. I told her that we cannot hurt or
kill the things (or people) we love. I told her that, because she had
"killed" that bunny, she could never play with it again.
About a week later, I slipped it back into her toy basket and, when she
asked why, assured her that I thought she wouldn't hurt her toys like that
again. She agreed. I recall that episode now with a certain embarrassment,
but when I recently heard Rosena explaining death and loss to her little
brother and sister, I thought: oh, maybe the drama of the shoebox burial was
actually helpful in some fashion.
Toys matter. We've put a fair amount of thought into what might be called
toy curation in our household. We've bought nothing new and little used.
Mostly, we've accepted shipments of hand-me-downs from friends who just
wanted "this crap" out of their houses. No guns came with them, thankfully.
After all, even toy guns can mean death under the wrong circumstances.
A year ago, I visited the Cuddell Recreation Center in Cleveland with my
daughter Madeline and a group of friends. That broad stretch of ball fields
and paths, anchored by a gazebo and a playground, was where 12-year-old
Tamir Rice was fatally shot by Officer Timothy Loehmann in November 2014.
Rice, an African American, was playing with an Airsoft pellet gun that a
friend's Dad had bought at Walmart. A replica of an actual Colt pistol, it
shot plastic pellets and looked pretty real, since the orange tip signifying
"toy" was missing. However, Officer Loehmann, investigating a report that a
man was carrying a gun in the park, was moving too fast to notice much. He
sped up and began shooting even before his squad car stopped moving. Rice's
hands were still reportedly in his pockets.
Though Loehmann was not indicted, the city of Cleveland paid a $6 million
settlement to the Rice family and demolished the gazebo where the boy was
shot. In the park that day, local activists described the shooting and its
aftermath to our group. Half listening, I followed Madeline as she toddled
into the playground. I tried to imagine Samaria Rice's pain in this
unremarkable place made part shrine, part soapbox by a police officer's
quick trigger finger, racism, and her son's blood.
I thought about that toy gun in Tamir Rice's hand and what might have been
going through his head as he pointed it and played with it. Despite the age
difference, it couldn't have been that far from what regularly goes through
my son's head when he picks up a stick and points it: pop, boom, wow! The
difference, of course, is that Seamus, blond and freckled and unmistakably
white, would run little risk of being shot down by a policeman, even eight
years from now with a replica toy gun in his hands.
Blasters, Blasters, Everywhere
Toys are a big business in this country, raking in $19.4 billion in 2015,
according to the retail tracking firm NPD Group. Our family is not
responsible for even a dime of this. Not surprisingly, then, my announcement
that we were all going to spend a rainy afternoon at a local Toys "R" Us
store came like a bolt from the blue for the kids.
I wanted to see what kind of toy weaponry was for sale there. I was curious,
among other things, about whether the boys at school who had taught Seamus
about superheroes, bad guys, and Star Wars had ignited in my son a love of
weaponry; I was curious, that is, as to how he would react to the walls of
guns I imagined Toys "R" Us displaying.
We got into our car as if it were Christmas Eve, Seamus beside himself with
excitement, Madeline on a contact high from her brother. I was experiencing
my own contact high, taking my kids on their first research trip.
What we found was not exactly what I expected -- on many levels.
Seamus was quickly overwhelmed by the glut of everything -- lots of pictures
of toys on boxes, but not a lot to pick up. (It was, in that sense, the very
opposite of our visits to the Goodwill store, where you can sit on the floor
and play with all those second-hand toys as long as you put them back
afterwards.) Not so surprisingly, in retrospect, he went straight for what
was familiar, what he could grab in his hand and actually look at: the
books. It took some effort to wrestle him away from Five Stories About
Princesses and enlist him in my quest for bad toys. (Madeline had, by then,
fallen asleep.)
I had finally found the Nerf "blasters," but he wasn't interested. "Let's
not go down this aisle, okay, Mom?"
I was, of course, looking for the worst of the worst when it came to
weaponry, but it proved remarkably hard to find. The aisle did, admittedly,
have the Nerf Zombie Strike Doominator and the Nerf Modulus Recon MKII for
$34.99 each. Those certainly sounded grim, given the eternal war against the
undead, but the bright orange, cartoonish, completely unrealistic "blasters"
on display and marketed to kids "eight and up" seemed distant indeed from
American gun carnage (and our wars in distant lands), nor was there anything
on the packaging that even hinted at real people getting shot in real
encounters or real wars. I must admit that I don't like the idea of Seamus
shooting anything at anyone -- even a brain-hungry zombie -- but as it
turned out, I needn't have worried, not this time around anyway.
Zombie-killing wasn't in his wheelhouse.
Still, I kept looking for the real gun aisle, and I did come across more
blasters, dart shooters, and the like, none with the word "gun" on them. Of
course, we do live in Connecticut, less than 100 miles from Newtown where,
in 2012, Adam Lanza, a devotee of violent video games who grew up in a
gun-filled house, killed 20 kids just a little older than Seamus along with
six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. So maybe our local toy outlet
was being sensitive, but I doubt it. There was the Halo UNSC SMG Blaster
(the initials make it sound extra tough but stand for nothing) for $19.99,
and the NERF Star Wars Episode VII First Order Stormtrooper Deluxe Blaster,
which fires 12 darts up to 65 feet without reloading, for $41.99. The worst
thing I could find was the Xploderz Mayhem, with "more distance, more ammo,"
which shoots easy-to-wash off mini-water pellets. It was on clearance for
$18.89.
By then, Seamus was pulling me frantically toward the aisle with the full
Frozen franchise on display. Madeline was now awake and in heaven.
So I left them there briefly and snuck off to do a last check for "real" toy
guns. No such luck. I didn't find the kind of Airsoft gun Tamir Rice was
playing with when he was killed. I didn't find an ersatz Sig Sauer either.
It turns out that most brick-and-mortar toy stores don't seem to offer
realistic-looking toy weaponry anymore, nor is there the toy store
equivalent of the curtained-off area in the old neighborhood video rental
shop where the porn was available. For such toys, you have to turn to an
online world of websites like Kids-Army.com, where you can indeed buy
realistic-looking toy rifles, shotguns, and pistols, or even to Amazon,
where you can find an Airsoft version of the Sig Sauer rifle for $249.99.
"Start Them Young"
The National Rifle Association (NRA) would undoubtedly have been
disappointed by my local Toys "R" Us outlet -- just as its officials
undoubtedly are by the way most big toy merchants seem to have left their
more realistic guns for the online world. This happened, in part, in
response to the sort of social pressure that my husband engaged in when in
high school and -- more critically -- the almost routine horror of the
blurred line between toy guns and real ones. You know we're a quirky,
gun-crazy nation when Cleveland could ban toy guns and umbrellas with pointy
tips from the area around the Republican Convention in the name of security,
but couldn't keep out the real guns in open-carry Ohio.
The NRA wants kids to play with realistic toy guns and BB guns, since they
believe that such toys are part of a child's initiation into the future
ownership of perfectly real guns. At the moment, the gun lobby is concerned
that not enough people have guns -- even though the 270 million to 310
million of them already amassed around this country (according to the Pew
Research Center) could arm just about every man, woman, transgendered
person, and child around. Still, despite the fact that Americans can now
carry guns in all 50 states and the NRA continues to win most of the big
political fights, the number of households with guns is actually down from
its peak in the late 1960s (though those that are armed have more and
deadlier weapons than ever before). No wonder the gun industry and the gun
lobby are fighting to produce an army of toddlers.
"Start Them Young," a February 2016 report from the Violence Policy Center,
details how gun manufacturers and the NRA are eager to market real guns to
younger and younger consumers. The report starts with a selection of quotes
from the industry: including this gem from Craig Cushman, marketing director
for Thompson/Center Arms, about their Hot Shot rifle for kids: "[We're]
talking about a tiny gun intended for the very youngest shooters -- the
ultimate first gun. We're targeting the six- to 12-year-old range." In other
words, kids are literally in their sights.
It's a strange world we live in. The toy industry has puffed up and
candy-colored its play guns, turned up the volume on the violence online and
in video games, and wrapped everything in plastic and safety warnings. At
the same time, the gun industry is making its guns smaller and cuter for
kids, while putting its energy into the all-important junior market.
Can we be safe -- any of us -- in a nation awash in guns? The gun-and-ammo
industry boasted $16 billion in revenue for 2015. Gun stores -- from
brick-and-mortar shops to online retailers - had $3.1 billion in revenue
that same year. The industry as a whole claimed responsibility for nearly
$50 billion in "economic activity" in 2015 alone. That represents a fair
number of jobs, but here is the number that really goes boom: $229 billion.
That's the annual cost of fatal and non-fatal gun violence in this country,
according to Mother Jones and analyst Ted Miller of the Pacific Institute
for Research and Evaluation who teamed up to crunch the numbers. That figure
includes both the direct costs of gun injuries and deaths -- police
investigations, emergency personnel, hospital bills, long-term care for the
injured, funeral expenses for the dead, and the costs of prosecuting and
imprisoning the perpetrators. As the report concludes: "Even before
accounting for the more intangible costs of the violence... the average cost
to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we
pay for 32 of them every single day."
We are awash in guns. Where does it end? Gun violence is imbedded in our
national mythology, our foreign policy, our notions of masculinity, our
entertainment industry, and our children's play. We see violence solving
problems on every screen -- from the zombie apocalypse to the rise of ISIS.
Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's maxim still applies: "One should not put
a loaded rifle onto the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." Sooner
or later, that rifle is sure to go off. It might be an accident; it might be
terrorism; it might be hate. But it will go off. Somewhere, as you read
this, it's going off right now.
I don't want to police my kids' imagination. And there is a whole strain of
parenting literature that assures me I don't have to. It says don't
interfere with your kid's play, even if it includes guns and shooting and
killing. Imagination is imagination and the violence isn't real. It might
even, so this line of thinking goes, be a healthy way for them to process
feelings of aggression.
I get what they're saying, but it seems like a cop-out to me. To my mind,
nonintervention is often a missed opportunity to be a parent. Sure, the
violence isn't real. The pow-pows don't actually rip skin and tendon or stop
hearts from beating, but the United States, which has been fighting distant
wars nonstop for 15 years now, does have a violence problem and a man
problem and a gun problem.
We know where that problem ends, but it starts somewhere, too. One place to
begin to look, at least, is at how our kids -- particularly our boys --
play, and how they are nurtured (or not), and taught to express their
emotions (or not). It is, at least in part, up to us, their parents, to
decide whether they are going to be the ones who help repair our society and
reorient us (or not). And it begins with the kinds of care and love they
receive, the kinds of conversations they are invited into, the kinds of
expectations they are given about behavior and relationships.
I don't want to raise Seamus, Madeline, or Rosena in the austere, ripped
from the headlines of horror, polemical atmosphere that was the essence of
my own childhood. But I don't want them to get comfortable with killing
either.
I want so much more for, and from, my little boy than "Pow, pow, yous are
dead now!" And that starts with taking the gun or the stick or the rainbow
flag out of his hands, sitting him down, and having a hard conversation
about what guns actually do to people-- and how much killing hurts us all.
Frida Berrigan, a TomDispatch regular, writes the Little Insurrections blog
for WagingNonviolence.org, is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being
Raised By Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood, and lives in New
London, Connecticut.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Frida Berrigan
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176170
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Guns for Tots
By Frida Berrigan
Posted on July 31, 2016, Printed on July 31, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176170/ ;
I remember well going to the rodeo at Madison Square Garden in New York City
with my six-guns proudly strapped to my hips. I was probably eight or nine
years old and those two ivory-handled -- okay, undoubtedly plastic --
revolvers were probably from a Hopalong Cassidy line of toys. That cowboy
character was a favorite of mine on TV and, of course, with my friends I
regularly played "cowboys and Indians." But far more of my war play -- we're
talking the early 1950s -- came out of World War II, my father's war, even
though the country was then involved in a bloody stalemate of a conflict in
Korea.
Imagine me, an eight or nine year old, running through the potato fields
behind a friend's house on Long Island. The year is probably 1952. America
is enmeshed in its second Asian war of the century, this time against -- to
a child -- a horrific but blurry enemy. Fortunately, the fighting that goes
on and on in a faraway land called Korea is unimaginably distant from this
moment. My friend and I crouch down, furrowed dirt and leafy potato plants
as far as the eye can see. The two of us scan the horizon. Somewhere out
there the enemy is approaching -- not the one in Korea, but a real enemy,
the "Japs" or Nazis ("Japanazis," as World War II comic books sometimes
called them) or maybe even those Indians. The choice is ours. No parents
nearby to tell us what to do, no teachers to instruct us, and we're armed. I
grip a stick. I can feel the curve where it fits into my palm, and what more
do I need than a good eye, the ability to make battle sounds -- the sharp
rat-a-tat of a machine gun, the budda-budda of ack-ack fire, or the long
whistle of incoming artillery? We've been at this for an hour already,
beating back attack after attack, then diving for our "foxholes" between the
rows of plants. "Watch out!" my friend shouts as loud as he wants, because
no one cares that we, and the invisible but palpable enemy, are here at war
in these fields. Yes, I notice it now, too: the faint motion of leaves that
might pass for the wind. It's them! A banzai charge! We leap up, firing
madly, but with deadly accuracy. The enemy begins to fall.
It was all so obvious to us then, millions of kids whose fathers had come
home, often grim and silent, from a terrible world war. Films glorifying
that war were a commonplace of our lives. The good guys and the bad guys
were clear. We could be left to our own devices because who should die and
why seemed so obvious, not only to us but to the adults around us. The world
of American war was, in fact, already growing increasingly complicated and,
more than a decade later, many of us would find ourselves in the streets in
opposition to just such a war, but we didn't have to worry about such things
then. What, I wonder now, thinking about TomDispatch regular Frida
Berrigan's latest essay on her children and our world, goes on in the junior
version of gun culture these days? What script or scripts are today's
children playing off of? How do zombies, terrorists, space aliens, and god
knows who or what else sort themselves out at the point of a gun when kids
begin to go pow-pow in 2016? What exactly are they powing in a world too
strange for words, one armed to the teeth and ready to kill right here at
home in ways inconceivable in 1952? In a world littered with dead bodies
from Orlando and St. Paul to Baton Rouge, Dallas, and Nice, not to speak of
Baghdad, Kabul, Tripoli, and Istanbul, in a world of drone assassinations
and god knows what else, what can they possibly be playing? Tom
"Pow, Pow, Yous Are Dead!"
Children, Toy Guns, and the Real Thing
By Frida Berrigan
It was a beautiful evening and the kids -- Madeline, two; Seamus, almost
four; and Rosena, nine -- were running across a well-tended town green.
Seamus pointed his rainbow flag with the feather handle at his sisters and
"pow-powed" them, calling out, "Yous are dead now, guys. I shot yous."
Madeline and Rosena laughed and just kept on running, with Seamus at their
heels. I hid my face in my hands. It wasn't just that he was playing guns,
but that he was using a Pride flag as his gun at a vigil to mourn those
killed at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. My pacifist husband
Patrick ran to redirect their activities, replacing the flag with a ball and
glove and beginning a game of catch. Vigil organizers were taking turns
reading the names of those killed into a microphone.
"... Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22
Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36
Luis S. Vielma, 22..."
Those three men and 46 others were massacred on June 12th. Another 50 people
were wounded. Omar Mateen, who killed them, was armed with a Sig Sauer MCX
assault rifle and a Glock 17 9mm semi-automatic pistol. He bought those two
weapons legally in the days leading up to the attack.
The carnage brought politicians and pundits out in force, using all the
usual arguments for and against guns. Because the victims were mostly gay
and mostly Latino, and because the attack was carried out by an American
citizen with an ethnic last name who may have been enthralled by Islamic
terrorism, or a closeted, self-hating homosexual (or both), the commentary
quickly became muddled. Was it a hate crime, Islamic terrorism, or a strange
double-bonus hit for the haters? Mateen was killed in a shootout with police
and so can't speak to his motives. Investigators were left to sift through
the material evidence and a dizzying compilation of online comments,
Facebook likes, and recollections from old co-workers, family members, and
possible lovers in their search for answers.
The most essential facts are, however, not that complicated: Mateen had a
license to carry a gun, training as a private security guard, and hatreds to
act upon. He armed himself and he killed.
And all over the country, since that fateful day that elicited the usual
cries of "never again," the killing continues: Alton Sterling and Philando
Castille by the police; Dallas Area Rapid Transit Police Officer Brent
Thompson and four Dallas Police officers, Lorne Ahrens, Michael Smith,
Michael Krol, and Patrick Zamarripa, by a lone sniper, Micah Johnson, who
himself was then killed by an armed police robot; three more police officers
in Baton Rouge on July 17th.
"... Montrell Jackson, 32
Matthew Gerald, 41
Brad Garafola, 45..."
And the killing continues. Using the Gun Violence Archive, I counted another
306 deaths by guns throughout the United States in the first eight days of
July alone. Most of them weren't high-profile police shootings or mass
tragedies, but in a small-scale and localized way, the grief and outrage of
Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas were replicated in every corner of this
country, including Ticfaw, Louisiana; Woodland, California; Tabernacle, New
Jersey; and Harvey, Illinois. More than 300 deaths by gun in just eight
days.
"Stabbin' My Bunny": Teaching Kids About Guns and Violence
And then, of course, there were my kids, my husband, and those "guns." As a
boy, Patrick wasn't allowed to play with toy guns. Instead, he, his parents,
and their friends would go to the mall during the Christmas buying spree to
put "Stop War Toys" stickers on Rambo and G.I. Joe action figures. When he
went to his friends' houses, he had to tell them that war toys were
verboten.
I grew up in a similar family of activists. We, too, were forbidden toy guns
and other war toys. My brother and I were more likely to play games like
"protester at the Pentagon" than cops and robbers. I've been thinking
recently about why toy guns didn't have a grip on our imaginations as kids.
I suspect it was because we understood -- were made to understand -- what
the big gun of U.S. militarism had done in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Indochina,
and throughout Central America. Our dad had seen the big gun of war up close
and personal. His finger -- the same one he pointed at us when we were in
trouble -- had pulled the trigger again and again in France during World War
II. He was decorated there, but had zero nostalgia for the experience. He
was, in fact, deeply ashamed of the dashing figure he had once cut when home
from the front. And so, dad screwed up a new kind of courage to say no to
war and violence, to killing of any kind. His knowledge of war imbued his
nonviolent peace activist mission with a genuine, badass, superhero style
swagger.
Our parents -- our community of ragtag, countercultural Catholic peace
activists -- made that no-violence, no-killing, no-matter-what point again
and again. In fact, my early experience of guns was the chilling fear of
knowing that, in protest, my father, mother, and their friends were walking
into what they called "free fire zones" on military bases, where well-armed,
well-trained soldiers were licensed to kill intruders. So we didn't point
toy guns at each other. We didn't pow-pow with our fingers or sticks. We
crossed those fingers and hoped that the people we loved would be safe.
Our inner city Baltimore neighborhood, where crack cocaine madness was just
taking hold, drove that point home on a micro level. Our house was robbed at
gunpoint more than once -- and we had so little worth taking. We watched a
man across the street bleed to death after being stabbed repeatedly in a
fight over nothing. People from our house ran to help and were there for far
too long before an ambulance even arrived. We knew as little kids that
violence was no laughing matter, nor child's play. It was serious business
and was to be resisted.
As parents tend to do, Patrick and I are passing this tradition on to our
kids, hopefully without the emotional scarring that went with our childhoods
of resistance. They don't have guns or action figures or any other toy
implements of death. Still, we've been watching Seamus, our Team Elsa (from
the Disney blockbuster Frozen) son, as he's recently begun turning every
stick into an imaginary gun. This is, of course, happening just as, in the
headlines of the moment, actual guns are turning so many previously real
people into statistics. Under the circumstances, how could I not find myself
thinking about toy guns, real guns, the nature of play, the role of
imagination, the place of parents, and how to (or whether to) police (ha!)
that imaginary play?
When my stepdaughter Rosena was about four, she found a toy dagger at the
playground, somehow smuggled it home, and was stabbing one of her beloved
stuffed animals, a bunny, repeatedly with it.
In the other room, I could hear the thumps on the bedroom floor and called
out, "What are you doing?"
"Stabbin' my bunny. I kilt her," she responded matter-of-factly.
Seizing a "teaching moment" and undoubtedly gripped by my own childhood
experiences and memories of my parents, I blustered into the bedroom with a
shoebox. "Now, your bunny is dead," I announced in my version of
over-the-top momism. "You know what happens when living things die, right?
It's forever, right? Now, we have to bury her." Rosena and I then "buried"
the doll on a high shelf in her closet. I told her that we cannot hurt or
kill the things (or people) we love. I told her that, because she had
"killed" that bunny, she could never play with it again.
About a week later, I slipped it back into her toy basket and, when she
asked why, assured her that I thought she wouldn't hurt her toys like that
again. She agreed. I recall that episode now with a certain embarrassment,
but when I recently heard Rosena explaining death and loss to her little
brother and sister, I thought: oh, maybe the drama of the shoebox burial was
actually helpful in some fashion.
Toys matter. We've put a fair amount of thought into what might be called
toy curation in our household. We've bought nothing new and little used.
Mostly, we've accepted shipments of hand-me-downs from friends who just
wanted "this crap" out of their houses. No guns came with them, thankfully.
After all, even toy guns can mean death under the wrong circumstances.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1939293650/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1939293650/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20A year ago,
I visited the Cuddell Recreation Center in Cleveland with my daughter
Madeline and a group of friends. That broad stretch of ball fields and
paths, anchored by a gazebo and a playground, was where 12-year-old Tamir
Rice was fatally shot by Officer Timothy Loehmann in November 2014. Rice, an
African American, was playing with an Airsoft pellet gun that a friend's Dad
had bought at Walmart. A replica of an actual Colt pistol, it shot plastic
pellets and looked pretty real, since the orange tip signifying "toy" was
missing. However, Officer Loehmann, investigating a report that a man was
carrying a gun in the park, was moving too fast to notice much. He sped up
and began shooting even before his squad car stopped moving. Rice's hands
were still reportedly in his pockets.
Though Loehmann was not indicted, the city of Cleveland paid a $6 million
settlement to the Rice family and demolished the gazebo where the boy was
shot. In the park that day, local activists described the shooting and its
aftermath to our group. Half listening, I followed Madeline as she toddled
into the playground. I tried to imagine Samaria Rice's pain in this
unremarkable place made part shrine, part soapbox by a police officer's
quick trigger finger, racism, and her son's blood.
I thought about that toy gun in Tamir Rice's hand and what might have been
going through his head as he pointed it and played with it. Despite the age
difference, it couldn't have been that far from what regularly goes through
my son's head when he picks up a stick and points it: pop, boom, wow! The
difference, of course, is that Seamus, blond and freckled and unmistakably
white, would run little risk of being shot down by a policeman, even eight
years from now with a replica toy gun in his hands.
Blasters, Blasters, Everywhere
Toys are a big business in this country, raking in $19.4 billion in 2015,
according to the retail tracking firm NPD Group. Our family is not
responsible for even a dime of this. Not surprisingly, then, my announcement
that we were all going to spend a rainy afternoon at a local Toys "R" Us
store came like a bolt from the blue for the kids.
I wanted to see what kind of toy weaponry was for sale there. I was curious,
among other things, about whether the boys at school who had taught Seamus
about superheroes, bad guys, and Star Wars had ignited in my son a love of
weaponry; I was curious, that is, as to how he would react to the walls of
guns I imagined Toys "R" Us displaying.
We got into our car as if it were Christmas Eve, Seamus beside himself with
excitement, Madeline on a contact high from her brother. I was experiencing
my own contact high, taking my kids on their first research trip.
What we found was not exactly what I expected -- on many levels.
Seamus was quickly overwhelmed by the glut of everything -- lots of pictures
of toys on boxes, but not a lot to pick up. (It was, in that sense, the very
opposite of our visits to the Goodwill store, where you can sit on the floor
and play with all those second-hand toys as long as you put them back
afterwards.) Not so surprisingly, in retrospect, he went straight for what
was familiar, what he could grab in his hand and actually look at: the
books. It took some effort to wrestle him away from Five Stories About
Princesses and enlist him in my quest for bad toys. (Madeline had, by then,
fallen asleep.)
I had finally found the Nerf "blasters," but he wasn't interested. "Let's
not go down this aisle, okay, Mom?"
I was, of course, looking for the worst of the worst when it came to
weaponry, but it proved remarkably hard to find. The aisle did, admittedly,
have the Nerf Zombie Strike Doominator and the Nerf Modulus Recon MKII for
$34.99 each. Those certainly sounded grim, given the eternal war against the
undead, but the bright orange, cartoonish, completely unrealistic "blasters"
on display and marketed to kids "eight and up" seemed distant indeed from
American gun carnage (and our wars in distant lands), nor was there anything
on the packaging that even hinted at real people getting shot in real
encounters or real wars. I must admit that I don't like the idea of Seamus
shooting anything at anyone -- even a brain-hungry zombie -- but as it
turned out, I needn't have worried, not this time around anyway.
Zombie-killing wasn't in his wheelhouse.
Still, I kept looking for the real gun aisle, and I did come across more
blasters, dart shooters, and the like, none with the word "gun" on them. Of
course, we do live in Connecticut, less than 100 miles from Newtown where,
in 2012, Adam Lanza, a devotee of violent video games who grew up in a
gun-filled house, killed 20 kids just a little older than Seamus along with
six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. So maybe our local toy outlet
was being sensitive, but I doubt it. There was the Halo UNSC SMG Blaster
(the initials make it sound extra tough but stand for nothing) for $19.99,
and the NERF Star Wars Episode VII First Order Stormtrooper Deluxe Blaster,
which fires 12 darts up to 65 feet without reloading, for $41.99. The worst
thing I could find was the Xploderz Mayhem, with "more distance, more ammo,"
which shoots easy-to-wash off mini-water pellets. It was on clearance for
$18.89.
By then, Seamus was pulling me frantically toward the aisle with the full
Frozen franchise on display. Madeline was now awake and in heaven.
So I left them there briefly and snuck off to do a last check for "real" toy
guns. No such luck. I didn't find the kind of Airsoft gun Tamir Rice was
playing with when he was killed. I didn't find an ersatz Sig Sauer either.
It turns out that most brick-and-mortar toy stores don't seem to offer
realistic-looking toy weaponry anymore, nor is there the toy store
equivalent of the curtained-off area in the old neighborhood video rental
shop where the porn was available. For such toys, you have to turn to an
online world of websites like Kids-Army.com, where you can indeed buy
realistic-looking toy rifles, shotguns, and pistols, or even to Amazon,
where you can find an Airsoft version of the Sig Sauer rifle for $249.99.
"Start Them Young"
The National Rifle Association (NRA) would undoubtedly have been
disappointed by my local Toys "R" Us outlet -- just as its officials
undoubtedly are by the way most big toy merchants seem to have left their
more realistic guns for the online world. This happened, in part, in
response to the sort of social pressure that my husband engaged in when in
high school and -- more critically -- the almost routine horror of the
blurred line between toy guns and real ones. You know we're a quirky,
gun-crazy nation when Cleveland could ban toy guns and umbrellas with pointy
tips from the area around the Republican Convention in the name of security,
but couldn't keep out the real guns in open-carry Ohio.
The NRA wants kids to play with realistic toy guns and BB guns, since they
believe that such toys are part of a child's initiation into the future
ownership of perfectly real guns. At the moment, the gun lobby is concerned
that not enough people have guns -- even though the 270 million to 310
million of them already amassed around this country (according to the Pew
Research Center) could arm just about every man, woman, transgendered
person, and child around. Still, despite the fact that Americans can now
carry guns in all 50 states and the NRA continues to win most of the big
political fights, the number of households with guns is actually down from
its peak in the late 1960s (though those that are armed have more and
deadlier weapons than ever before). No wonder the gun industry and the gun
lobby are fighting to produce an army of toddlers.
"Start Them Young," a February 2016 report from the Violence Policy Center,
details how gun manufacturers and the NRA are eager to market real guns to
younger and younger consumers. The report starts with a selection of quotes
from the industry: including this gem from Craig Cushman, marketing director
for Thompson/Center Arms, about their Hot Shot rifle for kids: "[We're]
talking about a tiny gun intended for the very youngest shooters -- the
ultimate first gun. We're targeting the six- to 12-year-old range." In other
words, kids are literally in their sights.
It's a strange world we live in. The toy industry has puffed up and
candy-colored its play guns, turned up the volume on the violence online and
in video games, and wrapped everything in plastic and safety warnings. At
the same time, the gun industry is making its guns smaller and cuter for
kids, while putting its energy into the all-important junior market.
Can we be safe -- any of us -- in a nation awash in guns? The gun-and-ammo
industry boasted $16 billion in revenue for 2015. Gun stores -- from
brick-and-mortar shops to online retailers - had $3.1 billion in revenue
that same year. The industry as a whole claimed responsibility for nearly
$50 billion in "economic activity" in 2015 alone. That represents a fair
number of jobs, but here is the number that really goes boom: $229 billion.
That's the annual cost of fatal and non-fatal gun violence in this country,
according to Mother Jones and analyst Ted Miller of the Pacific Institute
for Research and Evaluation who teamed up to crunch the numbers. That figure
includes both the direct costs of gun injuries and deaths -- police
investigations, emergency personnel, hospital bills, long-term care for the
injured, funeral expenses for the dead, and the costs of prosecuting and
imprisoning the perpetrators. As the report concludes: "Even before
accounting for the more intangible costs of the violence... the average cost
to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we
pay for 32 of them every single day."
We are awash in guns. Where does it end? Gun violence is imbedded in our
national mythology, our foreign policy, our notions of masculinity, our
entertainment industry, and our children's play. We see violence solving
problems on every screen -- from the zombie apocalypse to the rise of ISIS.
Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's maxim still applies: "One should not put
a loaded rifle onto the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." Sooner or
later, that rifle is sure to go off. It might be an accident; it might be
terrorism; it might be hate. But it will go off. Somewhere, as you read
this, it's going off right now.
I don't want to police my kids' imagination. And there is a whole strain of
parenting literature that assures me I don't have to. It says don't
interfere with your kid's play, even if it includes guns and shooting and
killing. Imagination is imagination and the violence isn't real. It might
even, so this line of thinking goes, be a healthy way for them to process
feelings of aggression.
I get what they're saying, but it seems like a cop-out to me. To my mind,
nonintervention is often a missed opportunity to be a parent. Sure, the
violence isn't real. The pow-pows don't actually rip skin and tendon or stop
hearts from beating, but the United States, which has been fighting distant
wars nonstop for 15 years now, does have a violence problem and a man
problem and a gun problem.
We know where that problem ends, but it starts somewhere, too. One place to
begin to look, at least, is at how our kids -- particularly our boys --
play, and how they are nurtured (or not), and taught to express their
emotions (or not). It is, at least in part, up to us, their parents, to
decide whether they are going to be the ones who help repair our society and
reorient us (or not). And it begins with the kinds of care and love they
receive, the kinds of conversations they are invited into, the kinds of
expectations they are given about behavior and relationships.
I don't want to raise Seamus, Madeline, or Rosena in the austere, ripped
from the headlines of horror, polemical atmosphere that was the essence of
my own childhood. But I don't want them to get comfortable with killing
either.
I want so much more for, and from, my little boy than "Pow, pow, yous are
dead now!" And that starts with taking the gun or the stick or the rainbow
flag out of his hands, sitting him down, and having a hard conversation
about what guns actually do to people-- and how much killing hurts us all.
Frida Berrigan, a TomDispatch regular, writes the Little Insurrections blog
for WagingNonviolence.org, is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being
Raised By Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood, and lives in New
London, Connecticut.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Frida Berrigan
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176170
