David Campbell: Why I changed my mind about toy guns

AS A self-declared sensitive new age dad, David Campbell banned his son from playing with any sort of toy weapon or water pistol. Then something happened to change his mind.

Stellar columnist David Campbell reveals what changed his mind about his ban on toy guns.

LET ME start with a confession that may not surprise you ... I don’t like guns. I’ve never fired a gun. Never held a weapon for fun. Well, that’s not exactly true. I still remember one of my favourite Christmas presents as a child when I got a bike and an official Star Wars Han Solo blaster, just like the one Harrison wielded in The Empire Strikes Back — the greatest movie in the series and that is a fact I will not debate here.

So, when I became a parent to Leo, I really doubled down on this, to the point where we did not want him to have any toy guns. No water pistols. No sticks shaped as guns. Nothing.

I had basically become Michael J. Fox’s dad in Family Ties . A sensitive new-age dad. A SNAD. Ugh, that sounds awful. Snaddy daddy. Ugh, that sounds worse — but I digress.

Over the summer we took the family to Malaysia to see some of my wife’s family, who happen to be American. They are super-fun and have a son who is about two years older than Leo.

Water filled my mouth and lungs, but I no longer cared.

We’ve had many an adventure together. Yet when we all trundled down to the pool, to my surprise, out came the water pistols. Leo’s eyes lit up. It’s Christmas. What, was I going to be the gun Grinch? So I asked my level-headed American cousin-in-law for advice.

“Have you shot a gun?” I asked.

“Of course, I used to hunt deer.” (He was basically chewing tobacco in a singlet at this point.) I stammered, in my slippers, “So, you have no problem with them using toy guns?”

He stared at me as if he were looking at me through the sights of a high-powered deer gun and I had antlers. “Dude, it’s a toy.”

He got me. Right in my hypocrisy. My facade crumbled and I heard the faint sound of Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams singing “Sha la la la” for the last time.

The offending “weapon”.

I turned and marched to the pool where the boys were filling up the pistols. Mariachi trumpets sounded in my head in the hot Kuala Lumpur sun. I grabbed the two spare plastic pistols, looked down the barrel of the camera (in my mind) and huskily whispered, “Let’s do this.”

I slow-mo leapt into the pool while shooting at those two unsuspecting boys. They scattered, howling with laughter, trying to catch me, but I had a stark realisation: they hadn’t seen what I’d seen. They knew nothing about the fight at Die Hard ’s Nakatomi Plaza and how to defeat Hans Gruber. Yippee ki-yay, pre-tweens … pew pew. I have paused the video over and over again in Rambo II and knew exactly how to use the water to divide and conquer these two no-hopers. In my head, I was all my heroes rolled into one. Arnie, Sly, Bruce — I’d studied the moves. Learnt the movies. I recited the lines like I made them up and belly laughed so much, water filled my mouth and lungs, but I no longer cared. Then it happened.

Victory. They didn’t see their defeat coming. Nor did they care. By the end we had so much fun. So much that Leo still talks about that afternoon and asks, “Can’t we do it again?” The truth is I want to. I want to overturn the rules I set up. To stop literally being the fun police and just have fun.

Then it hit me. Where we can have Leo’s birthday party this year? Laser Tag! I will crush his friends at Laser Tag.

David co-hosts Today Extra, 9am weekdays, on the Nine Network.

Originally published as David Campbell: Why I changed my mind about toy guns