imported post
I personally see it as a shift in culture. When you, or anyone else, went out into the world, there was an easily discernable distinction between the "toys" and the real thing. Plus, I doubt that the majority of children would even have access to anything that resembled your toy M16. However, in today's culture, children are bombarded with images of gun violence that makes it look "cool" to have a gun. This, coupled with the increasing level of irresponsibility of parents is enough to make skidmark's reaction reasonable.
Here's a story, from my own childhood, related to this and the consequences it had on my family:
When I was about 4 or 5, I wanted to be a policeman for Halloween. Myparents took me to Wal Mart and I picked out a nifty little blue costume that came with a duty belt, a nightstick, a walkie-talkie, and a little orange toy j-frame. I kept the toy gun, but the costume got lost somewhere. Anyway, one day, for some reason, I thought it would be cool to "pretend" to shoot myself in the head with the gun. Probably something I had seen on TV, or in a movie or something (remember, in the '90s we didn't have parental blocks and cable was in every room!). Fortunately, my mother happened to walk in right about the time I pulled the trigger. She freaked! and understandably so.
After this incident, my mother, who was working as an armed cashier/secretary at a local auto-shop, quit her job to go work at the carpet plant in the neighboring town. Why? She was so terrified by what she had witnessed that she wanted to sell her .380 so it wouldn't be in the house with me. My father, a member of the Sheriff's Posse, and an auxiliary police officer, gave me a very stern lecture, and bought a gun safe for all of his weapons (which had formerly been stashed away in the back of the closet (long guns) and on a top shelf in the closet (handguns), both out of my and my sister's reach). This one incident, an innocent mimicking of something a young child saw on television, shook my family to the core. It changed everything that my parents thought about kids and guns.
The unfortunate thing is, that there are kids all over the country standing in the corners of their rooms, pretending to blow their heads off, shoot their siblings, or whatever, and their parents either DON'T catch them doing it, or know about it and think it's innocent child's play. What happens when these kids, who are allowed to play with toy replicas of real guns, stumble across the .380 in Mommy's purse, or the .357 Dad keeps in the drawer in the den? Because they've been allowed to play with "harmless" toys with no instruction about the REAL dangers of guns, the outcome can very well be tragic. Children don't have fully developed cognitive maps. They do not understand the dangers of the world, and their parents aren't teaching them.
