Subject:
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Re: What do other parents do with Lego guns?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.loc.au, lugnet.general
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Date:
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Thu, 22 Jun 2000 19:14:04 GMT
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Viewed:
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788 times
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In article <FwHDFI.94z@lugnet.com>,
Deidre Rushton Brumby <drb@tasmail.com> wrote:
> So what do other parents do with Lego guns or is it not an issue?
I'm not a parent, so I don't really know, but when I was a kid, I was
really annoyed that Lego policemen didn't carry guns. It wasn't so much
that I wanted to shoot something, it was because police officers carry
guns. That's the way things are in reality, and I wanted my fantasy
to map onto something resembling reality as I knew it. [0]
I didn't find out for many years that there are a number of European
countries where police officers do not carry guns.
This is one reason why I don't think I would remove guns from a Lego
set for a kid. Simple fact was, in the old west, people _did_ tend to
carry firearm-- and things _did_ tend to get violent. If I want to make
sure a kid's not going to be violent, I don't know that denying history
is the way to do it. Perhaps at younger ages, the appropriate response
is to make sure that the kid doesn't get, say, a Wild West set. Later
on, I think I'd make sure that the kid understands that yes, that's
the way it was, and yes, that's not the way it is now, and these are
the many reasons why we've gotten more civilized over the years.
Or, we like to think we're more civilized, at least. :)
It's been said that conflict is the heart of drama. What most of
America doesn't seem to realize these days is that conflict is
not necessarily violent, nor armed-- but it _can_ be. Sure,
you can have good stories of Tigger cheating at Pooh-Sticks,
but you can also have the police cornering the evil madman who's
threatening to blow up the entirely of Legopolis. (And they say,
"Do your worst, bomber scum! We _live_ to rebuild our city!)
I don't think that cornering a mad bomber and using guns to do
it is unhealthy. Piglet blowing away Tigger for cheating at Pooh-
Sticks probably is...
Supervision, I think, is key. Certainly not 24/7, but play time is not
just "drop the kid in the room and let him play." I suspect that given
proper supervision and instruction when the opportunities arise that
most other problems sort themselves out-- and I suspect this is one
of them.
On the other hand, what do I know about child psychology? :)
[0] My police officers tended to carry my spacemen's guns. After all,
without little green monster aliens to zap, what point's a gun have
to a spaceman? Unless, of course, _my brother's_ spacemen are around.
We could zap them, but then, I hear they're not even really mini-fig,
they're creations of some demon evil monster! But seriously, reality as
I knew it as space-men go was the Apollo project, and they carried golf
clubs and experiment doohickeys, not zap guns... If there's no evil
LGMs running around, there's no good reason to have to zap someone.
-JDF
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--
J.D. Forinash ,-.
foxtrot@cc.gatech.edu ( <
The more you learn, the better your luck gets. `-'
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: What do other parents do with Lego guns?
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| (...) I agree....I dont think "Out of sight...out of mind" is the answer to our gun problems....The key is education......if a kid picks up a toy and hits someone with it....you take it away....the kid will just find something else to hit someone (...) (24 years ago, 22-Jun-00, to lugnet.loc.au, lugnet.general)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | What do other parents do with Lego guns?
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| Following on from the topic of "small action boys" and Lego stereotyping in loc.au, what do other parents do with the guns in their Lego sets? Until recently I'd only ever bought one set with guns (Pirate skeleton cave) and I threw them straight in (...) (24 years ago, 21-Jun-00, to lugnet.loc.au, lugnet.general)
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