Bang! Bang! I got you!

In the admittedly juvenile behavior of youthful males, the idea of shootouts and cowboys and Indians is paramount to their psyché. When I was that age, say six to about 35, running battles with finger guns or air bow-and-arrows was as common as a PB&J and milk lunch.

World what would we do if we couldn’t act out our favorite moments from some western or even the latest adventures of Superman or Batman? We had no choice; we had to do it. Any stick would easily become an assault rifle, and the old red wind-barrier fencing made great swords, already adorned with blood from the stain. What was even better was that as your hand would sweat some of the red paint would end up on your hands and hopefully trickle to your elbow. HooHah!

To this day, I remember my older brother Mike, saying “Let’s play cowboys. You be the good guy and I’ll be the vomit (sic).” Yes, he meant varmint, but as most young kids are, he was much more familiar with the other term and sometimes things get a bit misconstrued.

Still, running around the local neighborhood and hiding out behind a tree or a shed waiting for our friends (now made into enemies) to come around the corner and fall into our trap was just what we did as kids. Sure there were accidents, like the time I dropped the plastic stock on my dart gun on my friend’s head thinking I was Colonel Travis and saving lives at the Alamo. Which reminds me by the way, “Sorry Joey.”

Even as the years progressed, the idea of shootouts and using the forefinger as the principle weapon was epidemic. Maybe it was Charles Bronson who made it the mainstay it was errrrrrr is. Think back, if you can, to those movies he was in called “Death Wish”—long before “Die Hard” came around. And now that I think of it, don’t you think maybe the names we have on our movies has something to do with this problem?

Anyway, there’s a key scene in the first Death Wish movie right near the end. It’s when he is “asked” to leave New York and opts to change his locale to Chicago. “Paul” (Bronson) has just gotten to the Windy City and as he steps out on the street, he walks into a scene where a bunch of “toughs” has just knocked a couple bags of groceries out of an older woman’s hands and onto the ground. Paul stops and bends over to help the woman collect her groceries. As he is doing so, one of the “bad guys” turns and gives him the evil eye. Paul stops what he is doing and takes a look at the guy, then lifts his right hand, makes the proverbial index-finger-thumb-pistol and trips the trigger. Don’t remember that image? Oh well….

Even as a soldier we played games with weapons, I know that may seem obvious since we were soldiers once. But one of the games we played was who could draw their .45s fastest. We even had holsters, but anyone who ever tried that trick knew the holster was no helper. The best place to keep the .45 was in your waistband. From there, it was one quick move of the wrist to open fire. I mean, what else did we have to do between rounds at the rifle range?

Anyway, the finger-thumb pistol is so ubiquitous for young males that I believe it is probably part of our genetic code. No question somewhere in that pile of DNA strand there’s some sequence tied up in double helix that relates directly to thumb-forefinger weaponry. It’s the one place where nature and nurture are nearly indistinguishable. It would even prove wrong John Locke’s theory of the tabula rasa (blank slate); meaning everything we know is learned and not inherent.

Still in this day and age even this somewhat childish action has been blown out of proportion. Take for instance the recent incident involving an eight-year-old Prince William County boy who recently had his disciplinary records wiped clean of such a dastardly thing as pointing his finger-gun.

After having been suspended from Minnieville Elementary School for “threatening to harm self or others,” the family retained the services of a lawyer to keep the principal from including the incident in the boy’s disciplinary record. To me, it seems absurd that such a thing would even be a matter for a principal or any school administrator to be involved in.

The infraction, although basically harmless, is considered in the same category as bringing a real gun to school. Further, the boy’s actions were in response to another child who had pretended to shoot him with a non-existent bow and arrow. So where is his punishment?

Boy have we come a long way in this society. To think a child could be ridiculed and slammed for life over something as simple as playing seems to fit the ideology of our times. In this case, it only takes a bit of common sense to figure out who’s the good guy and who’s the vomit.