Isaac fantasizes about handling pretty much everything with a gun.
A couple weeks ago we were walking in our local park, which is under construction and which was blighted by broken glass. (It always is blighted by broken glass, by the way, and I’m hoping against hope that when the construction is done, and the park is all wonderful, that the broken glass will somehow be made to stop coming.) I had to carry Isaac for a ways to protect him from it—from huge shards that could actually go through his shoes, and from stumbling and falling and landing on it with knees and palms.
As I carried him, he asked me where the broken glass came from and why. I explained that sometimes people do stupid things, choosing my words carefully as Isaac is not allowed to called anyone “stupid.” I explained that they come here and drink too much alcohol, like beer or wine but stronger, and that makes them feel crazy, and then for no reason they just smash their bottles on the sidewalk instead of taking them ten feet away to the trash can. And that it’s wrong and bad that they do that.
“They’re bad people!” he shouted, maybe a little too vehemently.
“Well,” I hesitated. Moral relativism is a topic of hot debate between Ben and me. “They did a bad thing, a wrong thing, and it was very rude.”
“That’s rude! I’ll just shoot ‘em!”
“No, Isaac, you don’t shoot someone for breaking their whiskey bottles.”
“That’s rude! I’ll just shoot ‘em and kill ‘em and make ‘em DIE!”
Where to begin to address this?
For a while there, Isaac was threatening to shoot everyone and everything from dragons to T-rexes to robbers. Even abstractions like the wind, like a power outage, he planned to shoot. At one point I got worried enough that I sat him down and gave him a serious speech about death. I referred back to Mr. Cat, and how he died and never came back and we miss him and his life is all done. I pointed out that shooting someone can kill that person. And killing someone makes him die, and then he will never come back again, and people will miss him and that you can’t do that to someone else, no matter what. I didn’t get into the death penalty, although it seemed to me to be the elephant in the middle of the conversation. (I hope by the time he’s old enough to hear about it, it’s been abolished.) On the rare occasions that the subject of jail comes up, I explain it as a “time out for grown-ups.”
However my little “death talk” only had the affect of enhancing Isaac’s gun fantasies. Now he can’t just “shoot ‘em” and leave it at that, he has to “shoot ‘em, and kill ‘em, and make ‘em DIE!” To be thorough, you know.
The other day, we were watching a video about volcanoes. How they work; what they are, etc. (He had noticed volcanoes in the background of his dinosaur materials and got to asking about them.) And so, once he grasped that they were big and scary, he said, “I’ll just shoot ‘em! I’ll take my toy gun—pink—and shoot ‘em and make ‘em DIE!”
Now, if you’re like me, the fact that his imagined toy gun (he doesn’t really have one) is PINK was sort of tucked there almost subliminally. And the idea of him trying to stop a flow of molten lava by shooting it with a pink toy gun is, well, just another of those child-generated visuals that we have to just sit back and appreciate.
I recognize that at the core of this gun fixation is a desire to somehow have power in a dangerous situation, to take control and to create safety. So I’ve been trying to tackle from that angle. To either disarm the potential threat, or handle it in some other way. I’m not asking the kid to be Gandhi for god sakes. I just don’t want him threatening to kill everything and everyone on the slightest whim.
One example is that Isaac has a persistent fear of robbers coming in. I’m not at all sure how this evolved in the first place, but it’s there. A solution has presented itself—something to do with potty training. I’ve been trying to piece together how the solution evolved too, and I really can’t. All I can say is that now when Isaac thinks of a robber coming into the house, what he pictures that robber doing is breaking in, and then going to … take a whiz! And this idea, that someone would actually break into our house, defeating the security system and the dog, who would surely be trying to take off his leg, just to go pee in our toilet, is so hilarious that the threat posed is neutralized. And the locution, “Take a whiz!” is just about the funniest thing when Isaac says it. Or maybe it’s HOW he says it, with a little pause beforehand, his nose wrinkled up, and a slight side-to-side motion of the head as he rushes through those three little words. “And then a robber will come in and… take a whiz!” Hee, hee, hee. It’s impossible to be afraid of such a silly person. And no need to shoot him and make him die, either.
This morning I was telling him about something naughty that Mr. Cat once did, breaking an important piece of amber at a house where we were guests. And Isaac began with his usual solution, he said, “I’d just—“ but then instead of saying he would kill him and make him die, he said, “I’d just give him a time out!”
Progress.