What happens when you give a gun to a kid?
Are we more free when we’re an adult or when we’re a child?
BY: NOAH FARBERMAN
When Ralphie asks for a Red Ryder BB gun, in A Christmas Story, his mother, teacher, and mall Santa all tell him the same thing: “You’ll shoot your eye out.” Fudge me for saying this, but if I was that kid’s parent, I’d be more worried about him shooting my eye out. In this movie, the protagonist’s primary goal is to get enough good deeds in so that Saint Nick decrees him worthy of an air-soft rifle. In other words: feign nice so they give him what he wants.
And yet the message of the movie seems to draw closer to the danger of the weapon itself, time after time repeating the mantra, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” In the end, Ralphie gets his gun and the first shot he takes ricochets and breaks his glasses, thus cementing the film’s message: guns are dangerous. Don’t give guns to kids.
Still, year after year, movie after tv show after videogame, we keep giving guns to kids. Juxtaposing opposites seems like an innate human desire: old activities and young adults, danger and innocence, freedom and confinement. Is there a through line to be gleamed? Some possible answers that we’re looking for? What are we hoping to find out by giving guns to kids? Looking at increasing amounts of media on the topic, a throughline starts to rise in the idea of exploring adult-perceived freedom and the loss of innocence in filmmaking.
But first, I would like to cover two things: What is a gun, symbolically, in the media, and what does it mean to give a child a gun versus what does it mean when a child seeks one out on their own. To start, I want to suggest that Light Yagami of the anime series Deathnote is neither a child, nor his weapon, the Deathnote, a metaphorical gun.
The reasoning behind this is that while still a teenager Light discovers the notebook by an arguable chance, it is later revealed that his personality type is much closer to sadistic than innocent, thus characters who are claiming to be natural born killers or have a history of darker thoughts can’t be given guns the same way that Harry Potter could. (This is inverted with shows like The End of the F*cking World in which a character perceives themselves to be one way, sociopathic, due to a lack of experience.)
To that point, while Harry’s wand is gun-like, it functions closer to the Red Ryder weapon of Ralphie. That is until Harry is given the Half-Blood Prince spell-book, metaphorical bullets, which Harry fires into Malfoy, not-knowing their effect but perfectly aware of the possible implications, and eventually into Snape, full-well knowing the power of his newfound weapon.
That is to say, my rules for determining what is giving a child a weapon are as follows: The kid must not already be prone to violence or violent thought, Light Yagami, Luke Skywalker, Lucious (from the video game Lucious), etc., nor can they be fully aware of the impact that a gun can have until they fire it (and they always fire it). Finally, a gun must be, in most cases, clearly a gun, as in: looks real, feels heavy, could be loaded but a child couldn’t know that.
So, what happens when you give a kid a gun? According to the writer’s team at Workin’ Moms, a CBC original series, kids will, hopefully, appreciate the danger the weapon presents. In a season three arc involving one of the main Moms and her daughter, Alice, a gun is brought into their home and hidden, unbeknownst to Alice, in the basement.
While during a playdate, Alice and her friends’ parents are enjoying a terribly awkward dinner on the main floor when Alice notices something behind an air vent. When the parents run downstairs to check on the cause of the very loud bang noise, Alice stands, smoking gun in hand.
The camera reveals a bullet hole in a lamp, less than a meter away from her friend’s head. Stopping here, Alice explains that she both didn’t know the gun was loaded, or that it was real. Thus, saying that Alice was incapable of appreciating the possibility that if it was real, it shouldn’t be played with. I.E. Curiosity killed the lamp. Ann then hides the gun in a drawer only to find it, and Alice, missing during the next episode. Very quickly we learn that Alice had stolen the gun and returned it to a police station, telling the officers that she had found it on the street.
The episode ends with Ann telling Alice that she’s proud of her and, after a season of unruly and problematic behaviour, that she is finally ready to trust her daughter. Alice, in response, tells her mother that she no longer trusts her. The gun having forced a dynamic flip in which Alice, a young teenager, proved more capable of understanding the dangers of a live firearm, than her mother, almost directly stating that Alice’s innocence towards the subject matter allowed her the ability to be affected by the weapon.
Of course, that’s nothing new. Humans have been aware of the effect guns have on youth for a great many years. In the 2019 war film 1917, we are shown two young men, barely out of their teenage year, forced to grow up in a single day. And yet in WWII satire film Jojo Rabbit, we are shown an instance of a character who is unphased by the weapons, only able to grow up and change after the toll of war impacts him directly. The difference being, to the directors, the latter child was conditioned heavily, as part of the film, to love the idea of killing, thus having been desensitized to the idea of killing, he is only capable of change after experiencing loss directly. Which further emphasizes that notion of curiosity and experiencing something for oneself.
And yet, as the 1989 smash hit Heathers shows us, sometimes that temptation is only just tempting. When Veronica Sawyer is given a gun and told that it's filled with tranquilizer bullets, she chooses to believe it. But when the time comes to “tranq,” Veronica intentionally misses. The difference here is that Veronica, and her P.I.C., JD, are entering into a situation in which the gun is intentionally going to be used to harm. You see, in all cases, the guns given to children are often only fired as either experiments of curiosity, last-ditch efforts of survival, or, in Veronica’s case, as means of providing an alternative to actually shooting someone.
Filmmakers love to give kids guns, but they hate it when kids use them.
In Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, readers are given a gateway into the lives of child soldiers in Sierra Leone. As Ishmael describes, in the book, it was only the first time he used the gun that it felt difficult, impossible, from then on it was a numbness, a depression-like feeling that took him over and allowed him to keep going, if only for personal survival.
In Canada we are luckier. When there’s a mass shooting, Canada implements new regulations quickly. We ban firearms. We make people reapply for permits under new regulations. We react, something that in itself is unfortunate, but, for the most part, effective in terms of lowering mass-shooting rates. And we are transparent. Take the case of the Nova Scotia Shooter from April of last year. We would be wrought to find a Canadian unfamiliar with their name or their impact on Canadian history. As a way to encourage removing guns from homes, Canadians allow the image and descriptions of gun-violence in a home.
We give kids the impact of guns, without giving them a gun.
To bring this back around to the central question of “What happens when you give a kid a gun?” the answer is you take away their ignorance. You ground them in a reality of impact.
When we’re a kid we feel trapped, like we’re not allowed to do anything. Ironically, the only way for us to truly be free of that idea of lacking control over ourselves is to appreciate a lack of control over others.
If you give a kid a gun you’re giving them adulthood, responsibility, and pain. It’s a roundabout way to say: if you want to take away a kid’s freedom, give them some good ole fashioned American freedom.
