Karl Penny adds some useful perspective on children’s war games, which were referenced in my post about the school that deemed tiny toy World War II soldiers like the ones featured in “Toy Story” a threat to student peace and safety. Here is his Comment of the Day to the post, More School Abuse of Students and Culture: The Deadly Cupcake Caper:

“My friends and I used to organize war games, armed with toy guns, with which we would industriously go about “killing” each other. Today, of course, we are all psychopathic, gun-obsessed, would-be killers, just waiting for the trigger event that will send us off to wreak the next massacre at someplace where people gather.

“If I had uttered the preceding sarcasm at any sort of school function, I’d shortly be explaining to the police that no, officer, I’d never dream of shooting up anyplace, and I just spoke carelessly, and I’ll never do it again, and please don’t take me to jail…. For heavens sake.

“We were kids, relatively powerless in a large world, filled with hard to comprehend authority figures, some genuine dangers, and lots of hard to understand rules. In short, the world could be a scary place. Sure, we were, objectively and in adult hindsight, very safe and very blessed to be that way. But it didn’t always seem that way in a child’s eyes. War games and the like were a way of coping, of making us feel powerful and in charge of our situation. They helped channel our energy and natural aggressions in a way that was, at the end of the day, not only harmless, but fun. Later, of course, we learned that our games were downright idyllic in comparison to the actual horrors of war as waged in the real world. But, at the time, they served a constructive purpose. Our parents and other elders and authority figures knew what we were up to, smiled tolerantly and, probably, said a little prayer no real aggressions would be in our future. They them had just lived through the largest and most destructive war in human history. But they knew that we were just playing, as they had similarly played in their own youth, and that our games were no predictors of our own future.

“They were right. Today, we are properly horrified of war, of violence, of senseless aggression. But we are not killers, bullies, or other violent sorts. Not the overwhelming majority of us, anyway. Sandy Hook did not show that there is something terribly wrong with people today. It showed that there was something terribly wrong with Adam Lanza that day. It said nothing about the millions of other people who never thought of harming another person.”

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Graphic: Hit Collect