Guns or knives, Butch?

Happy Valentine's Day from Korea!

I'm a pretty easygoing parent, don't you think? You want to draw pictures in shaving cream all over the toilet? Okay. You want to splash soapy water and food coloring all over the kitchen floor? Fine. You want to lick the floor? Sure, go ahead. Eat flour? Saves me some cooking. Get in the tub with your clothes on? Have fun and wash the dishes while you're at it. You want to scatter dirt and papers all down the hallway for a project? Whatever. But now Weston's come up with something that I actually find alarming.

He's been cleverly crafting weapons out of various items lately. Sometimes it's a gun, sometimes a sword, and sometimes 'a gun WITH a sword!'. His friend Ella was over the other day, and they each made a surprisingly detailed gun with Tinker Toys. Weston's looked like a tommy gun, with a handle. The blue disc in the middle slides back and forth, making a suitably obnoxious noise. Ella's gun was a multi-barrelled wonder of engineering. That girl is definitely going to be one of three things: a designer of some kind, a dictator, or a middle school principal. I'm sure her perfectly lovely parents will be thrilled by any of these options.

Because I am a pretty standard peace-loving liberal, I do not love the whole gun thing. Lloyd, however, being neither peace-loving nor liberal in any way, thinks it's EXCELLENT. Why my sweet, lovable, precious little boy is driven by the evil brew that scientists call testosterone to fashion guns out of formerly innocent playthings is totally beyond me. We don't watch violent cartoons, and we don't run around the house brandishing firearms. Lloyd totally WOULD, of course, if he could. Unfortunately for him waving guns around is illegal here: not a firearm to be found anywhere, much to his dismay.

From what all the stupid books say, this is a normal boy thing, so I tolerate it as best I can. I have a hard time with the actual shooting and stabbing, though. I have a 'no shooting' policy, which works fine when Lloyd isn't home. The other day he was here and he heard me tell Weston, 'Don't shoot your brother. If you do, I'll have to put your gun away.' Lloyd looked at me in disbelief, like I was the biggest moron on earth, and said, 'But that's what they're for!'

Huh.