… Forget the contrived “war on girls”, I’ve been saying there is a war on boys before it was cool. My impending, and always accurate, sense of doom began exactly ten years ago with the birth of my son. From the very first play date where all the moms repeated to their toddler sons, “Don’t hit. We don’t use our hands for hitting”. The “happy hands” philosophy later evolved into restricting their sons from playing with guns and toy weapons.

Here’s the thing… a little boy can turn anything into a weapon. A stick is a sword. Break the stick and it becomes a gun. The same can be said for plain old building blocks. Pretty much anything. If he can hold it, it’s a gun.

I’ve seen my son turn sweet and snugly stuffed animals into grenades and cannonballs of death launched across the living room. The floor is always lava and if you roll out of the hammock you get eaten alive by a swarm of circling sharks. Peril and bloodshed lurk everywhere. That’s just how the mind of a boy works.

What do you suppose happens when you stifle these natural tendencies? All this anti-gun hysteria is causing a rise in school shootings. Yes, I said causing. Kids needs to work through their behavior, test the boundaries, and that’s how they learn what is socially acceptable. Deny them that outlet and BAM… recipe for pathological behavior.

Also we need to dispel this myth that things are evil and not actions. What we’ve instilled in kids is a disconnect from their actions and those action’s direct consequences. It’s like that anecdote you hear where a man, as a young boy, shoots a squirrel with his BB gun and becomes so horrified he vows never to touch a gun again. The gun isn’t the problem, pointing it at small animals is.

You know what else sets my teeth on edge? Reading about innocent little boys, 5 and 6 years old, being ostracized and suspended from school for doing what they are naturally wired to do. As far as I am concerned this blatant intolerance and reverse sexism is terrorizing our male children. It’s child abuse under the guise of political correctness. A perfect example of this terror can be found here, where a five year old is interrogated for two hours and becomes so frightened he wets his pants.

Simply put, any teacher or school administrator that doesn’t understand how little boys work doesn’t deserve to be working with children. Instead of admonishing children for chewing pop tarts in the shape of a gun, we fire every single teacher and principal who takes leaves of their damn senses. Lose your common sense, lose your job.

There, I fixed it.

Related reading; Don’t Shoot That Lego Gun At Me

It’s news stories like this that make me mourn the loss of common sense and compassion.

Both children were kindergartners – five and six-year olds. If you’re at all familiar with children that young, you know that they are still very shaky on the concept of actions having consequences. They’re not evil. They’re not terrorists. They’re little kids who have new toys that they want to show their friends. They’re little kids who jam things in their pockets and then forget about them. They do not go around premeditating ways to stick it to the man and strike fear in the hearts of their peers by bringing Lego guns on the bus. But to witness the hysterical responses of school officials, you would think these were hardened criminals who are a clear danger to society.

… I think these zero-tolerance rules are actually exacerbating the problem.