The only thing more predictable than boys being fascinated with weapons is them eventually sketching one in class. But that\u2019s not allowed anymore.<\/p>\n
What is it that makes a little boy \u2014 practically straight out of the womb \u2014 take an interest in weapons and emulate gun-toting, swash-buckling heroes? Even doctors aren\u2019t sure. As one pediatrician told me about my then 16-month-old son who turned every stick into a sword, \u201cWe don\u2019t know why. They just do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve raised a little boy, you know what I\u2019m talking about. And the only thing more predictable than them being fascinated with weapons is them eventually doodling one in class. An alien with a laser gun. An elf with a sword. Rambo with a machine gun.<\/p>\n
When they do, they\u2019ll encounter a host of school polices banning images of weapons, ostensibly to prevent school shootings and other violence. Some make exceptions for historical context (such as a Revolutionary War soldier with a bayonet).<\/p>\n
Others don\u2019t. Who can forget\u00a0the infamous Pop-Tart gun of 2016<\/a>? The 7-year-old was suspended.<\/p>\n If your child is lucky, he\u2019ll be told to put the drawing away. If he\u2019s unlucky, he\u2019ll be sent to the principal\u2019s office and then to the school counselor, where he may even be given a\u00a0suicide assessment<\/a>.<\/p>\n My first encounter with this type of policy was when my youngest boy came home from a Fairfax County, Virginia, elementary school with his shirt inside out. On the front was an image of a Lego Ewok holding \u2014 eek! \u2014 a tiny axe.<\/p>\n I recently encountered this policy again with my 10-year-old son. He had gotten in trouble for drawing a police officer holding a gun. A police officer.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n In an email, my son\u2019s teacher said she explained to him that drawing weapons in class is not allowed and encouraged him to \u201cstick to dragons and landscapes.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My heart goes out to my son\u2019s teacher, and to every teacher, who has to worry about one of their students bringing a weapon to class. But I was honest: I have no problem with my son drawing a police officer with a gun, an alien with a gun, or pretty much any other living creature holding a gun. Bugs Bunny once pointed a gun at Nasty Canasta. I\u2019m fine with that, too.<\/p>\n My son\u2019s interest in guns is not a violent one because he\u2019s not a violent boy. He\u2019s a peacemaker \u2014 an empathetic child who cares for animals and respects teachers. He\u2019s shot real guns under the supervision of responsible, trained adults. His grandfather was a cop, which is why he sees them as heroes.<\/p>\n But the fact remains: He\u2019s a boy, and boys have been drawing weapons for hundreds of years.<\/p>\n Part of the thinking behind forbidding gun imagery, I gather, is that if a boy takes an interest in guns, he\u2019ll take an interest in bringing a gun to school and killing people with it.<\/p>\n Schools must enforce the thinking of our increasingly leftist-controlled culture, which paints gun usage as only negative. There is no sporting use. No self-defense use. No stopping-the-bad-guys use. Were guns a moral good when they stopped Hitler from marching millions\u00a0more\u00a0<\/em>into the gas chambers? I think so.<\/p>\n Perhaps the thinking behind the \u201cno gun imagery\u201d rule is that fellow students will look at the drawing and fear the child is\u00a0the next Nikolas Cruz<\/a>, thus creating an uncomfortable learning environment.<\/p>\n If the child\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0mentally ill and has the intent to do harm, wouldn\u2019t the drawing provide important and life-saving insight into his mental state? And wouldn\u2019t he draw it anyway, regardless of your policy? Ethan Crumbley, who killed four fellow students at his Michigan high school, wasn\u2019t drawing cops or cowboys.\u00a0The blood-soaked images<\/a>\u00a0he drew were surrounded by clear red flags: \u201cMy life is useless.\u201d \u201cBlood everywhere.\u201d \u201cThe thoughts won\u2019t stop, help me.\u201d<\/p>\n The second and more likely possibility: The child\u00a0is not<\/em>\u00a0mentally ill and is drawn, in true male fashion, to the gun-toting (or tiny axe-holding) hero archetype. If it scares the teacher and fellow students to see a doodle like this, they are inferring something about the nature of males that is incorrect: that aggression and strength can never be harnessed for good.<\/p>\n A gun is a neutral extension of the person holding it. It can bring peace and restore justice, or it can destroy peace and create injustice. Sometimes it doesn\u2019t even need to be fired. A police officer defending innocents is good. A murderous gunman surrounded by schizophrenic rantings is bad \u2014 and deserves the attention of parents and authorities.<\/p>\n To determine what kind of drawing they\u2019re looking at, teachers could simply use discretion. Yet, unfortunately, discretion is what today\u2019s inflexible school policies \u2014 and our increasingly litigious society \u2014 prevent. Every incident is treated the same, with no regard for the damage it may do to the child.<\/p>\n What is that damage? When a boy gets punished for drawing a weapon, he is being gaslit and emasculated. He will probably still be interested in guns, only now he\u2019ll feel guilty for it. He\u2019ll see his interest as psychotic. He may even be introduced \u2014\u00a0by his teachers\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 to the very adult concept of suicide.<\/p>\n As Michel de Montaigne, the great French Renaissance philosopher who believed in the philosophical, nonviolent education of children observed: \u201cBy punishing boys for depravity before they are depraved, you make them so.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether we like it or not, guns and weapons are a masculine interest. And if you suppress healthy masculine interests, you tend to get a rebound effect, and not a good one. The only masculinity that is \u201ctoxic\u201d is the kind that erupts when boys have no healthy outlets for these interests. Case in point: America\u2019s schools keep suppressing masculinity and yet we keep getting more of what we don\u2019t want \u2014 violence and fury.<\/p>\n The group of boys in Florida\u00a0who savagely beat a 9-year-old girl on the school bus<\/a>\u00a0in an assault straight out of \u201cLord of the Flies\u201d weren\u2019t allowed to draw guns in school either. But they no doubt never learned what a fair fight is, or (thanks to our society\u2019s obsession with erasing male-female differences) that there\u00a0is\u00a0<\/em>a weaker sex. Did they have nonviolent guidance and love from adults, and a way \u2014 other than perhaps violent video games \u2014 to diffuse masculine interests?<\/p>\n In my interactions with teachers over this issue, I\u2019ve been told time and again that they agree with me (or at least understand my points) but that \u201cthese are simply the times we live in.\u201d<\/p>\n This defeatist explanation seems to suit us adults for the moment, but does it make sense to a child? A 10-year-old doesn\u2019t have the knowledge or the maturity to wrap his head around the \u201cepidemic of school and mass shootings.\u201d The rule only makes sense to him if we burden him with a dark, pessimistic view of the world \u2014 leading only to more anxiety and more shame.<\/p>\n He doesn\u2019t know\u00a0why\u00a0<\/em>his desire to draw a cowboy or an alien or a cop with a gun is a red flag. He just knows that Doc Holliday looks cool when he twirls his gun in \u201cTombstone.\u201d He\u2019s drawing the same doodle that a member of the Greatest Generation would have done in school, only he\u2019s getting punished for it.<\/p>\n We should ask ourselves if the remedies that schools are employing to stop school shooters are only making normal little boys feel like psychopaths until they surrender to a softer, weaker, more effeminate version of how God created them. And then as parents who love our little boys, we need to do something about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was lucky this phobia wasn’t around when I was in school, because I spent a lot of my time in high school art class sketching guns. Banning My Son From Doodling A Gun Is Not A Solution To School Shootings The only thing more predictable than boys being fascinated with weapons is them eventually … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crap-for-brains","category-education-schools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90310,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90309\/revisions\/90310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}No Drawings with Guns Allowed<\/h2>\n
![\"Author's](\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/gun.jpeg\")
Signs of Mental Illness?<\/h2>\n
No Discretion Allowed<\/h2>\n
How Can a Child Understand?<\/h2>\n