Guns in the house?

Will woke up yesterday all lovey-gushy.

Daddy, I love you so much. You’re my best friend. And Owen’s my best friend and Mommy’s my best friend. 'Cause I love Owen and Mommy and you so much.

We told Will how much we loved him too. But that was enough of the niceties for Will.

But Ally and Puff and all my other friends aren’t very nice. I’m going to shoot them down with a gun.

My fumbling response: You wouldn’t want to do that, because they wouldn’t be around anymore. Guns can kill people.

Rob: Where did you hear about guns Will?

I just hold it in my hand and I shoot them down.

Rob: Do you pretend that you have guns with your friends at school.

Yeah. And I just shoot them down...

I know guns will be a part of Will’s play and I’m not going to hover and censor him (although I’m not planning any plastic machine gun purchases for Christmas). But I do need to start talking with him now about the dangers of real guns.

This article on Parents.com suggests that as parents we should probably be asking our friends if they keep guns in their house, and if so what safety measures have been taken to ensure children have no access to them, before we send our explorative children over to play. It cites a recent Pediatrics report that nearly 1.7 million American children live in homes with unlocked loaded firearms and a study by San Francisco General Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health that found that: “In 39 percent of families where parents said their 5- to 14-year-olds didn't know where guns were stored, the kids actually did know the location. In 22 percent of homes where the parents said their children had never handled a gun, the kids told researchers that they had.”

I’ve very rarely left Will at a friend’s house – usually I still accompany him for play dates – but once he starts going solo more these are questions I’m probably going to start asking, awkward as it might feel at first. I can see how little Will understands about life and death and irreversible dangers, and guns are one place where there’s no room for exploration.