I loved toy guns as a kid, so why am I struggling to let my son play with them?

, or any depiction of one, for as long as possible. When we did finally happen across a drawing of a rifle just before he turned two, near the beginning ofwhen a hunter shoots and kills the elephant’s mother, I quickly turned the page and left his questions about the weapon unanswered. But it was unavoidable. Guns are littered across kids’ movies—Yukon Cornelius brandishes a pistol to shoot the abominable snowman inthe villain takes aim at the protagonists with a vintage rifle.

My father, a pacifist and conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, never forbade me from playing war. Shockingly to me now, he also never protested as I amassed a small arsenal of realistic-looking guns of various shapes and sizes. More to the point, Levin says the united toy and media industries used a knowledge of child psychology to make more profits. “Young children think very simply and in dichotomies—right and wrong, good and bad, boy and girl,” she says. “So violence was used to market to boys, and appearance and sexualization was used to market to girls.”, the action show about soldiers fighting enemies who, in animated villain tradition, were a collection of psychopaths, cyborgs and femme fatales.

The type of rough-and-tumble play that accompanies faux war, she says, helps kids test their physical limits and discover the boundaries of their bodies. For example, kids might learn to communicate with their friend when something hurts or when tussling becomes too scary for them. Although Fiore emphasizes that she is not a fan of real guns in real life, she understands the draw toy ones have for kids.

While Levin has long been part of pushing back against violence in media, and wasn’t crazy about her own son getting interested in pretend war, she never stopped him from shooting imaginary bad guys and, like Fiore, doesn’t think a complete shutdown of gun play is necessary. In fact, she thinks the pretending probably helped her son make sense of the violence he saw on screen. “We just tried to constantly humanize it,” she says.

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