The battle rages on, good versus evil, screams of pain cut the air, followed by "fall down you're dead"..."no, you didn't hit me"..."I did too!".
I loved those days as a child. The bad guys always lost, good always won and the girls were equally involved with saving the world as the boys. Sometimes we had toy guns, most of the time we had sticks but every one of us had a vivid imagination.
I've started building 'marshmallow guns' to sell and it's going well, but every now and then [actually quite often] I hear, "oh my grandson would love this, but his mom won't let him play with guns". Why not? It's pretend. I'm not getting it folks.
You can argue that guns are a lethal weapon and that children playing make believe with them leads to violence...but I don't buy it. I shot hundreds of people as a child, but not one as an adult with a real gun [and I know some who deserve to be shot]. I think it's great for a child to decide to stand up for what's right and to defend the morals that we instill in them and it's our job as parents to raise children who know there's a violent way to solve their problems, but CHOOSE another way.
I heard a statistic on T.V. that just floored me and forever changed the way I view programming. "A child will witness an average of 40,000 murders by the time they're 18 years old." This statistic only includes T.V. viewing. At first I thought "no way". Then I started to add 'em up...'cause I'm a skeptic. One murder on a daytime show, 2 murders on the evening news, one murder on a crime show equals 28 murders per week, 1456 murders per year for a total of 26,208 in an 18 year period. WOW...maybe it's not the gun-play making our children immune to violence...MAYBE we've desensitized them by overloading them with murder on T.V...
I don't know where to begin when it comes to the video games, how many extra deaths do they provide our children I wonder. Even my 4 and 5 year olds feel nothing when they talk about 'dying'. They just go get another life, it's not final...that's not very real.
Here's a thought for the video game makers...You only get one life!!! If you die...to bad...you have to buy another game, no restart no earning extra lives, just done, game over...
Rules to play by....
When you're shot with a marshmallow gun you gotta stay dead.
When a bad guy wants to turn good [so he doesn't get shot] you gotta let him join the good guys.
If you yell 'freeze' and the bad guy takes off running...shoot him in the knee so he can't go any further.
Bye for now. T