Doublethink again. As Frank pointed out in his post Police Oversight and Dead Children, “Our society is all about guns; men are supposed to like them; boys are supposed to play with fake ones. I wish it weren’t so. But it is wrong for a society to tell a boy in a million ways that guns are cool and then blame him for getting killed.”
I was looking for an incendiary image that I could use for my last post. I wanted a picture of a woman looking afraid while holding a gun, so I typed “woman holding a gun” into Google search. The images that popped up were disturbing, but not in the way I was expecting.
I understand the phallic nature of guns, the sense of control and power that holding one apparently exudes, but I still think it’s a stupid and dangerous fetish. I presume that’s the reasoning behind making paintball and other types of “toy” guns look so realistic, so boys can play men (and by “boys” I mean grown men who don’t want their toys to look like toys). Actually, I understand that too.
Unfortunately, there are too many real guns in the world and therein lies the real problem.