Is gun play good or bad for children? For many years I emphasized its harmlessness. When concerned parents expressed doubt about letting their children have toy guns, because they didn’t want to encourage them in the slightest degree to become criminals, I would explain how little connection there was. In the course of growing up, children have a natural tendency to bring their aggressiveness more and more under control if their parents encourage this . One- to two-year-olds, when they are angry with another child, may bite the child’s arm without hesitation. But by 3 or 4 they have already learned that aggression is not right. However, they may pretend to shoot their mother or father, but smiling to assure them that the gun and the aggressive behaviour aren’t to be taken seriously. In the 6- to 12-year-old period, children will play an earnest of war, but it has lots of rules. There may be arguments, but real fights are relatively rare. At this age children don’t shoot at their mother or father, even in fun. It’s not that the parents have turned stricter; the children’s own conscience has. In adolescence aggressive feelings become much stronger, but well brought-up children can turn them into athletics and other competition or into kidding their friends. In other words, I’d explain that playing at war is a natural step in the disciplining of the aggression of young children; that a cautious parent doesn’t really need to worry about producing a criminal. But nowadays I’d give parents much more encouragement to guide their child away from violence. A number of incidents have convinced me of the importance of this. One of the first things that made me change my mind, several years ago, was an observation that an experienced nursery school teacher told me about. Her children were hitting each other much more than previously, without reason. When she talked to them, they would protest, “But that’s what the Three Stooges do.” (This was a children’s TV program full of violence which immediately became very popular.) What further shocked me into reconsidering my view was the assassination( ) of the former President, and the fact that some schoolchildren cheered about this. (I didn’t so much blame the children as I blamed the kind of parents who will say about a President they dislike, “I’d shoot him if I got the chance!” ) These incidents made me think of other evidences that Americans often tolerate lawlessness and violence. We were hard on the Indians and the later waves of immigrants. At times we denied justice to groups with different religions or political views. And now a great percentage of our as well as our child population has been endlessly fascinated with dramas of Western violence and with cruel crime stories, in movies and on television. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we Americans on the average have more aggressiveness inside us than the people of other nations. I think rather that the aggressiveness we have is less controlled, from childhood on. To me it seems very clear that in order to have a more stable and civilized national life we must bring up the next generation of Americans with a greater respect for law and for other people’s rights than in the past. There are many ways in which we could and should teach these attitudes. One opportunity we could seize in the first half of childhood is to show our disapproval of lawlessness and violence in television programs and in children’s gun play. I also believe that the survival of the world now depends on a much greater awareness of the need to avoid war and to actively seek peaceful agreements. There are enough nuclear arms to completely destroy all civilization. This terrifying situation demands a much greater stability and self-control on the part of national leaders and citizens than they have ever shown in the past. We owe it to our children to prepare them deliberately for this awesome responsibility.