School Police Visit

Get this.

My child and her kindergarten classmates went on a field trip to a police station yesterday, the theme has been Community Helpers, and anyway they were all shown how a truncheon is used to hurt 'bad' guys and were all shown the different aspects of a gun and were allowed (this is the shocker)to hold it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

sounds like you'll need to debrief with your child. Being an anti gun person myself, I would talk about my values with your child - so that she knows that although she held a gun - well - it's not something that she should want to hold or use. It's shocking what people don't consider shocking anymore - i'm shocked for you as well! but, try not to let it bother you too much (as it is a crazy world we live in) but make it a learning and communication opportunity for you and your child.

Just out of curiousity, did your child tell you this is what happened or did an adult tell you this? Sometimes, our kids aren't always accurate. If it is true, though, that's pretty shocking. My daughter had a police officer visit her school (she also has children at the school) and the police officer mainly spoke about the ways that police officers help in the community.

It's true.

Her teacher advsd me what happened when they got back and my daughter already knows who can use a gun and that they are bad. SO i'm not worried whether it will affect her, just shocked that this happened in the first place, and from the people that were meant to be educating her.

Not surprised by this - the same thing happened at the school I work at when a junior class went to visit the Police Station last year.

What else would you expect? Really? That police will ask a triad to stop annoying a shop owner? Surely children should be taught that there is a difference between violence (bad, not good to do) and law and order (good in principle, but keep checks on the "good guys") - at the very least to show the difference between what they are exposed to on TV and books, and what is acceptable? My little boy has learned how to point a gun, and he is not yet two. Who taught him? No idea. Probably from the other boys in the playground. So go for it - do not be shocked, be proactive. Teach your child the difference between right and wrong. Guns in the hands of bad people = bad. Guns in the hands of police = tool for maintaining law and order. Hopefully.

Last Christmas, I came across a picture of my fourth birthday party in the UK. I am playing "Cowboys & Indians" (is that still PC, or does one play "Cowboys & Native Americans" now?).



Anyway, in the photo we all have toy guns - the type that fire noisy paper caps - and we are clearly enjoying shooting each other. When I was young, it would be an exceptional British parent who objected to kids playing with toy guns like that.



But then, twenty years after that party, my American boss invited me to his five year-old son's party in a smart commuter town near New York. I brought a birthday gift for his son: a toy gun. When the kid opened the gift, his parents went apopleptic .... the nearest I have ever seen "normal" people coming to completely insane rage. They hurled the toy out of the window and yelled at me. I was baffled.



Years later, I realised the difference in perspective: gun crime in Britain (until the 1990s) was virtually unheard of. Guns for the British are things that you see in the movies or in news footage. They are not "real" in the British mind. Even the police in Britain do not (routinely) carry guns.



But the US is different. Almost every large US city has gun crime every day. Guns (and their consequences) are very real to Americans - not abstract as they are to the British. Perhaps this gives equally responsible, well-meaning parents on each side of the Atlantic a completely different emotional response to guns.