Don’t Shoot

When my son, Nathaniel, was 3, he wanted a toy gun more than anything else in the world. He begged. He pleaded. He whined. He cried. And he tried to manipulate me.

“The kind of gun I want, Mommy, doesn’t kill people,” he said. “It makes them come back alive.”

Unfortunately for him, the only thing greater than his desire for a toy gun was my conviction that he shouldn’t have one.

He’d already turned the age-old childhood practice of fashioning a gun out of nothing into a fine art. I’d walk into his bedroom and see him, head bent over his Legos, carefully placing one brightly colored piece into another. I’d beam with pride at his inventiveness--until, seconds later, he would lift up his creation and take aim.

I’d also been shot at with Tinkertoys, a butter knife, sticks from our yard and, of course, his fingers. I’d watched as he lowered a plastic sword (a weapon I’d already caved in on), and with the requisite rata-tat-tat-tat sound of a machine gun, fired away at me in my kitchen.

But I stood my ground.

That is until one morning, pre-coffee, when I walked into the kitchen and discovered that my son had chewed a perfectly good piece of toast into a flawless replica of a handgun. He was aiming at my head. “OK,” I said. “I will buy you a gun--but only if you learn to go poop in the potty.”

You see, Nathaniel was still using diapers. I, however, had been through this before with his older sister, and I was done. I’d begged. I’d pleaded. I’d cajoled--all to no avail. But now I had the perfect bribe in my pocket.

My husband, who was sitting at the kitchen counter, lowered his coffee cup and said, “I thought we had agreed: No guns.”

“I’m giving up,” I answered. “For God’s sake, he’s shooting me with a piece of toast.”

By the next day, Nathaniel was using the potty--and demanding his gun.

When it was time for me to hold up my end of the bargain, I headed to the toy store. I had worked it out in my mind that if I bought him a six-shooter--the kind my friends and I had played cowboys and Indians and cops and robbers with when we were kids--I could live with my decision. After all, a six-shooter tucked into Nathaniel’s holster, accompanied by suede chaps hanging from those skinny legs and a cowboy hat perched on his head, was an image that conjured up gunplay from a more innocent era. At least that’s what I told myself.

As I pulled up to the mega-toy store on La Cienega Boulevard, I was confident that I’d be in and out in just minutes--giving me plenty of time so that Nathaniel would arrive from preschool and find his six-shooter, neatly wrapped, waiting for him.

But after navigating the aisles for a half an hour, I found myself empty-handed. I asked a salesperson for help, and was surprised to find that he had no idea what I meant by a six-shooter. As I explained in detail what the gun looked like, he started nodding his head. “Sorry,” he said, “we don’t carry toy guns. They’re too dangerous.”

“Of course, you carry guns,” I replied, dumbfounded. I insisted that he return with me to the aisle where I had seen large plastic replicas of machine guns and rifles with names such as the Exterminator and the Deer Hunter.

“These aren’t dangerous?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “It’s store policy.”

I left nonplused but undeterred, quickly setting off for another toy store. Again, there was no six-shooter. Again, I asked and was told: “We don’t carry toy guns. They’re too violent.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “How is a little six-shooter more violent than the Vaporizer and the Atom Blaster?” The salesclerk just shrugged.

My next stop was a boutique toy store in Beverly Hills that I knew carried old-fashioned toys such as pick-up sticks, jacks and marbles. Surely, I thought, it would have an old-style toy gun.

I was wrong. At least this time, though, I got an explanation I could understand. The owner told me that the Western-style toy gun I wanted looked too realistic.

“Toy stores,” he said, “no longer sell toy guns that look like real guns. They sell cartoon guns.”

When I finally got home, I broke the news to Nathaniel: I was unable to find the gun that he so coveted (never mind that he would have been happy with any gun--six-shooter, Atom Blaster, whatever). Feeling as dejected as he did, I promised I’d keep looking.

And I did. A weekend or two later, I was supposed to go to a party where Western-style attire was required. I happened to pass a ramshackle store that had racks of Western shirts on the sidewalk and the promise of cowboy boots and hats inside. I pulled over and walked in.

And there it was, hanging on the wall over the register, still in its original package: a shiny six-shooter inside a rawhide holster with fringe--just as I’d remembered it. As a bonus, the gun came with a lariat and a tie slide to hold a bandanna in place.

“Is that gun for sale?” I asked.

“Sure,” the man behind the counter answered.

“How much?”

“Fifty dollars,” he said, presenting the gun as “an antique” sold at the Gene Autry museum gift shop when it first opened in 1988.

I didn’t hesitate, plunking down the $50. I felt great.

So did Nathaniel. He loved that six-shooter and took it everywhere. He wasn’t allowed to have it at preschool, of course. But we had it with us during the 20-minute drive to school. He’d leave it in the car, hidden under the seat, so he could grab it again when I picked him up at noon. At night, when his dad would tuck him in, he’d fall asleep clutching his gun like a teddy bear.

It wasn’t long after, though, that I started to think of all the stories I had heard about toy guns being mistaken for real ones--episodes with sometimes fatal outcomes.

There was the fake-pistol-toting man at a Halloween costume party in Benedict Canyon who had been killed by police when they thought he had pointed a real gun at them. And there was a Huntington Beach teen shot dead by police after he brandished a toy rifle--20 inches long with a steel-blue barrel.

One day as I was running errands, I pulled up to a red light and noticed that a police patrol car had stopped alongside me. Nathaniel was in the back seat brandishing his six-shooter. “Oh my God,” I screamed, my heart beating wildly. “Put that gun down.”

Scared by my tone, he blanched. He dropped the gun and began to cry.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just that your gun, well, it could be--dangerous.”