We Deal in Nerf, Friend

(This column appears in today's Philadelphia City Paper.)

Bloody hypocrite, I am.

I write extremely violent novels. In my latest, which will be published in a few months, an angry man stands on a rooftop in South Philly, waiting for someone to finish a slice of pizza so he can take him out with a sniper rifle.

In my previous book, a pregnant woman pistol-whips a middle-aged guy.

People are hurled from moving El trains. Heads explode. Corpses are smeared with peanut butter and left out to be feasted upon by rats.

(Doesn't Jennifer Weiner write about this stuff, too?)

I won't delve too much into my obsession with fictional violence; basically, it boils down to my fascination with the idea of a person on the worst day of his or her life. Through fiction, I can experience it/deal with it vicariously.

Plus, I admit it: It's fun.

When people complain about America's thirst for celluloid violence and bloodshed ... dude, I'm the guy with the cup, trying to push it under the tap for another gulp.

Give me graphic violence.

Give me guns.

Give me liberty...

... so Hollywood can give me death.

Here's the hypocrite part:

I am totally freaked out by the idea of my kids playing with toy guns.

This past Saturday my son pulled his toy car out of the garage — the only car we park in there — with his little sister in the passenger seat. The high-pitched whine of the battery-powered engine was like a clarion call throughout the block; kids started coming out from everywhere. Behind bushes. Decks. Doors. Trapdoors in the grass.

And they were armed to the teeth.

I don't think I've ever seen toy guns like these before. One resembled a Vietnam-era helicopter-mounted machine gun — only in bright white plastic. This gun dealt in Nerf, friend. Puffy little Nerf-style bullets. Two other kids were draped in armored gear, which featured some kind of sticky surface that would catch the bullets, so you could easily see who lived, who died, and who would lose part of their spleen.

I didn't catch the entire exchange, but I think my kids were pretty much carjacked with a high-powered Nerf gun.

My son was a little freaked out.

"I don't want you to shoot me," he said.

Now if this were a novel, the fictional me would have trained my fictional son to field-strip that plastic deathdealer in two swift moves, then incapacitate his attackers with the driver's side door and the clunky metal ashtray, plucked from the dashboard.

However, you can't go around paralyzing the other kids on the block.

(This is one of the many ways being a crime novelist doesn't do dick to prepare you for parenthood.)

But the situation was even trickier.

My wife and I agreed, early on, to banish toy guns from our house. I was fine with that. While my childhood toy box didn't exactly look like it was stocked by Colosimo's Gun Center, I did own a plastic pistol or two. My parents weren't about censoring; I pretty much saw and heard everything I wanted to, no matter how violent. And I was willing to concede that maybe there was another way. So no toy guns, no shoot-'em-up video games.

But how do you deal with another kid sticking a toy gun in your own child's face?

This past Saturday, we balked. We packed up the kids, drove to a park, let them kick around a soccer ball. Away from the guns.

Talking about it later, my wife and I realized the answer was staring at us point-blank. We need to teach our kids how to use the same weapons I do:

Words.

Our job is not to shelter them from violence, but to teach them there is another way. Reaching for a gun is not the way to settle a disagreement. Talking through a disagreement is the way to settle a disagreement. You can say it's just a toy, and fine. But toys teach kids how to manipulate reality.

And you know, I didn't tell you the worst part about what happened on Saturday.

Later that evening, our 4-year-old son was thinking about that afternoon. And then he said something that stopped us cold:

"Next time, I'll get a gun and shoot him."

We've got to do better than that.