Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer and WNYC. Speaking of guns, for our last segment today, we're going to open up the phones for parents, speaking of guns and speaking of parents. Do you let your children play with toy weapons of any kind, and do you ever think playing make-believe with them is okay, 212-433-WNYC? We're going to go up the pecking order here. Do you let your kid play with water guns? I know a parent who does but doesn't call them water guns, calls them squirters.

Do you let your kid play with water guns? Do you let your kid play with Nerf guns? Continuing to go up the chain, how do you feel about laser tag, how about, maybe this is just an adult thing, paintball? Where do you draw the line as a parent or for yourself as an adult regarding play with anything that can be characterized as a gun, even if it has absolutely no possibility of harming anybody, water guns okay, 212-433-WNYC or not, Nerf guns, 212-433-9692.

We ask partly because a parent brought to our attention the summer camps, very expensive camps, in fact, I'm told that teach kids how to modify Nerf guns. This is like a Nerf gun camp. Anybody listening ever send your kid to a Nerf gun camp. The camp website takes care to refer to them as blasters, not guns. For this one camp, in Brooklyn, that we were told about the word gun doesn't appear on the website but in this week-long camp your kid would learn how to take apart a Nerf gun, sorry a blaster, and modify it to, as they say, "create the most competitive foam flinging springer blaster with all the best mods."

This is their language, "Install high kg springs, modify airflow valves for max air pressure, retool parts for better air seals, install custom 3D printed parts," 3D printing things, that's how they make those guns in the real world, modified darts for better weight distribution and more, and that's from this camps literature. It says campers will "engage in regular games of Nerf throughout camp and trips to the on-site blasting range."

The site emphasizes safety practices. I'm told it's creative, I bet really fun for a certain kind of kid who was probably a future engineer of some kind if you want to look at it through that lens, but is it basically glorifying gunplay or giving kids a safe outlet to express maybe these desires or maybe it just creates desires, I don't know that they either do or don't have anyway. On the one hand, it's guns, on the other hand, it's foam, it's Nerf. What about water guns, what about laser tag, 212-433-WNYC? We'll take your calls after this.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Okay, water guns, Nerf guns, laser tag any of it okay? Anybody send your kids to one of those Nerf gun camps that don't call them guns? Amy in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Amy.

Amy: Hi, how are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. You got a story for us.

Amy: Yes. Well, I have two sons, they're five and nine. I started off with them with no guns, no water guns. You don't call it a gun, you call it maybe like a space laser shooter or something like that. You use spray cans or spray bottles instead of guns at the waterpark and all of that. As they got older, they would just look in envy of these big either Nerf guns or big water guns that looks like assault rifles practically. As they got older, I started just chipped away at my firm that's about it, and I started to give them this and that and water guns, little water guns became big water guns.

Then when the pandemic happened, I was just trying to get them off their screens, and last summer, I just gave up, and I got Nerf guns just to get them off their screens and playing violent stuff. I got them Nerf guns to play with each other in the yard because we've rented a house, and they had so much fun with it. They just looked like, they were having a blast and arrows. I think like, "Oh, arrows, they're better than guns."

Brian Lehrer: Right, yes. Send our kids out we bow and arrows. Do you think in retrospect that it had any negative impact, or you're like, "Ah, it's fine, it's Nerf?"

Amy: I don't know because after a couple of weeks ago when the incident happened, and it also was on the heels of a birthday party that was like a big, not paint gun, but they used guns with like chalk paint in them and shooting at each other and in the park and stuff, and it definitely did not feel great to me. I still think it's probably not the problem. It's probably not such a problem. It's just the culture around guns. We talk about it, this is just pretend, this is pretend, and we certainly don't use anything that hurts anybody, but I don't know.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for starting us off. Appreciate it a lot. Desiree in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi Desiree, thanks for calling in with, I think, an important perspective on this.

Desiree: Yes. Hi, Brian. I don't let my son play with any kind of toy guns, water guns. I don't care what it is. I don't care if it's painted green. I just don't. As a young Black boy, I feel like I can't let him even get comfortable with having those in his hand or take the risk that someone misinterprets it as anything, so absolutely not. No one's allowed to give him any if he gets some, they will be taken away.

Brian Lehrer: Because of what a police officer, Tamir Rice, and all of that, Right?

Desiree: Right. Some of them are made so realistically now. I don't want him to get comfortable thinking, "It's just a toy, I'm just playing with it," and now he's got one that looks more like an actual gun, and someone mistakes it for something else. Rather, he'd not even think that that's okay, but when you did ask the question, it did dawn on me in that moment that I really because you said weapons, and I realized I don't make those kinds of judgments with for toy swords and he doesn't really have any knives but swords and stuff like that. I don't make those kinds of judgments at all. I don't think twice about him having a toy sword, but it's an absolute no for a gun.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe because swords aren't actually prevalent in society, so they're the things of old movies or whatever and the guns are irrelevant. I don't know, maybe that's what goes into it. Desiree, thank you. Sam in Brooklyn, is it yes on toy guns, right, Sam? Hi, Sam.

Sam: Hey, Brian, thank you very much for taking my call. Yes, it's important for kids to be able to express aggression in a playful way so that aggression doesn't take on the-- to use jargon, it doesn't get perfected, doesn't get endowed with all of the passion of something that is taboo. If you take it away and draw the strict lines about it and you can read about this in my book Today is Now! by Dr. Benjamin. The important thing is to allow a safe space for play and for aggression, and if you're not comfortable with that, give your kid a caulk gun and get them to retile the bathroom.

Brian Lehrer: [laughs] Maybe that's the common ground that everybody can agree on, but you're raising, and I hear you promoting your book, that's okay but there's the tension, right? Are you letting the kids act something out that they sort of get out of their system so there's less of a need to do it in real life or are you normalizing something that could be really dangerous, and obviously for you, you're saying the former?

Sam: Kids understand the zone of play. We let them wrestle, that doesn't mean we're turning them into violent creatures. We are mammals, beneath it all, and play and wrestling and aggression are normal and healthy and if you will them off, and symptoms them, that's where you can start creating the excitement that leads to problems.

Brian Lehrer: Sam, thank you very much.

Abby in Maplewood is going to get our last word on this. Hi, Abby. We have about 30 seconds for you. Thanks for calling in.

Abby: Hi. [unintelligible 00:10:08] for taking my call. I'll try to be quick. We've never allowed guns in the house, toy guns, obviously, water guns. We've played water guns at friends' places, they've gone to laser tags. My son's turning 10 and hasn't had a birthday party for years because of this pandemic, and really wanted laser tag.

I looked at a lot of companies and they advertise these realistic-looking guns, realistic sounds and I just couldn't do it. I found a place that has something called Hero Blast, where you wear a glove and it has almost like a Spiderman shooter on the top and you do laser tag that way and at the time, that felt okay to me.

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Abby: His birthday party is next week and now after the shootings this past month and last week, I literally, this morning, wrote to two friends saying, "I don't know if I can even do this Hero Blast version, just the act of pointing at someone, pulling a trigger and feeling a jolt of happiness for me landing on the target just doesn't feel great to me."

Brian Lehrer: You haven't decided yet and with that dilemma, appropriately, we leave it. Parents, thank you for your various perspectives on this.

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