I was reading this in the paper;


Young boys should be encouraged to play with toy guns and other weapons at nursery to get them interested in education, according to government advice. The guidance told nursery staff to resist their ''natural instinct '' of stopping children playing with weapons in games.
(source L'pool Echo)


Not sure what playing with toy weapons has to do with getting young kids interesed in education ?? - do they mean encouraging them to enjoy going to nursery ?

anyway, what do you think ? Is it ok to let kids have toy weapons ?

When my son was a very young I resisted letting him have toy weapons .. well I started off with all good intentions ! .. but over time he would aquire some cheap plastic cowboy gun or knight's sword from somewhere :rolleyes: - usually given to him by someone else, or later on he even bought his own at the shop around the corner !! :)
I was very unhappy a couple of times though when someone bought him a plastic machine gun, after me refusing to buy them for him!

I'm not sure if it does any harm though. We all used to run around playing cowboys and 'shooting' at each other didn't we ? .. or playing Robin Hood and having 'sword fights' :)

It depends on what type of toy weapon it is I suppose.

Whilst I agree in not glamourising toy weapons in nursery, the oldies on here will recount the old cowboy films or swashbuckling films as you say and they 'did us no harm'. Obviously there should be a ban on replicas which can be activated into the real thing and like i've said before a mandatory 8 years for having the real thing, fired it or not and a sentence for using a replica or toy one as fear in hold ups etc.

In these days of armed police it is dangerous for kids to play with toy guns, some of them look very real. There was a case here recently where a 12 year old pointed a toy gun at a cop who was on a stakeout to catch potential robbers , the cop did exactly what he was trained to do and the child is dead.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1855490/posts