New York Folklore Society Newsletter

"Children, for generations, have expressed their fantasies not only in playground rhymes but also with toy guns. Often, parents try to eliminate toy weapons from children’s play—to no avail. One mother told me, "I knew my effort to keep my son from playing with weapons had failed when he bit his peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the shape of a gun."

image of Steve Zeitlin
Steve Zeitlin is executive director of City Lore. His column is a regular feature of the Newsletter.

NOTE: The New York Folklore Society Newsletter and New York Folklore Journal were replaced by Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore which debuted December, 2000.

New York Folklore Society
P.O. Box 764
Schenectady, NY 12301
518/346-7008
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nyfs@nyfolklore.org

Fall/Winter 1999

FALL/WINTER 1999 NEWSLETTER MAIN PAGE

Bang Bang, You’re Dead: The Play Paradox
by Steve Zeitlin

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school," goes a traditional schoolyard song. Twelve times since 1997, our eyes have witnessed students opening fire on their fellow teachers and students. As American schoolchildren, the perpetrators of these crimes probably shared in the irreverent, often violent rhymes in American children’s folklore. Unlike others, they grew up to act them out—"we have tortured every teacher, and we’ve broken every rule."

The shootings at Columbine High School by Dylan Klebold and Erik Harris on April 20 were the most tragically imitated crime in our wave of student violence. Just eight days after the shooting, a 14-year-old Canadian student donned a trench coat and killed 17-year-old Jason Lang. In the few months before the end of the school year, T. J. Solomon in Conyers, Georgia got his hands on a .357 magnum and gunned down six students. Understanding the nature of play and its relationship to violence can help us grasp these school-yard tragedies and some of the steps we can take to prevent their recurrence.

To fathom the impact of Columbine shooting, we need, reluctantly, to give Klebold and Harris credit. They succeeded in elaborating their own forms of violent adolescent folklore into a detailed fantasy—they proclaimed death to all enemies, dressed in black, formed a club, hosted a web site, devised a suicide pact, even adopted a catchy name, the now infamous "Trench Coat Mafia"—and projected it on to reality. Life imitated art. Their crime developed instant copycat appeal, and Klebold and Harris have evolved into schoolyard legends, the ones who did "burn down the school."

Children, for generations, have expressed their fantasies not only in playground rhymes but also with toy guns. Often, parents try to eliminate toy weapons from children’s play—to no avail. One mother told me, "I knew my effort to keep my son from playing with weapons had failed when he bit his peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the shape of a gun."

In his essay "Fun in Games," Erving Goffman describes the self-imposed boundaries that form around humans at play. He describes them as a membrane pulled across the players. Rules of transformation tell the players how the real world will be modified inside the encounter.

The paradox of play is that, even within the play bubble, youngsters crave the most realistic toys. Even though they can transform a peanut butter sandwich into a gun if they have to, they prefer the most graphic weaponry. As a child, I wanted a cap gun—that was the most realistic weapon available. Then I craved an air rifle, then a BB gun.

Goffman’s metaphorical "membrane" is fragile. The bubble bursts so easily; then play and real life flow into one another. The more realistic violence in play becomes, the greater the likelihood that—when the bubble bursts—actions will have tragic consequences in the real world.

The play paradox applies to electronic games and television. The more forms of fantasy and play resemble violence, the more likely they will lead to real violence. I grew up watching cowboys on television and at the movies; they were far more removed from real violence than, for instance, contemporary horror films about a murderer loose in the school. It’s no coincidence that Klebold and Harris played the most violent and realistic video games and that many video games closely resemble training simulators used by the military.

At the same time that violence in play has become increasingly lifelike, the weaponry that play mimics grows increasingly accessible. Americans own 200 million guns. More than one third of American families own one—and the guns look just like the toys.

Gun control doesn’t eliminate firearms; it makes them slightly harder to come by. The Brady Bill, the ban on U. S.-made assault rifles, the background checks at gun shows—each modest piece of legislation has that inexorable effect. Uzis are given up for semiautomatic pistols, semiautomatic pistols for .38 caliber pistols.

The struggle for gun control is a way of forcing violence back to less destructive forms of mayhem, closer to play. In time, it may reach the point where all a poor junior high school student can get his hands on is a .22, maybe even an old fashioned switchblade; maybe homemade zip guns of the '50s will come back into style, and today’s kids will try their hand at the old arts and crafts of the street.

Or maybe we can get back to that day in the l880s when one feared New York City gang escalated the level of violence by introducing the horseback riding whip into its arsenal of weapons. There will still be deaths, only fewer ones. Emergency rooms will be busy patching people up, instead of declaring them dead on arrival.

In the wake of Columbine, many teachers and administrators have tried to squelch children’s fantasies. In one Maryland school, a student was suspended for making a gun out of papier mâché; in others students have been disciplined for expressing violent fantasies.

But the problem is not the fantasies and the folklore, which have always been a part of growing up. In the children’s rhymes, it doesn’t matter if "I met her in the attic with a semiautomatic" or if "I hit her on the butt with a rotten coconut." But it matters enormously if someone is threatening violence with a stick or a semiautomatic weapon.

As concerned adults—teachers, parents, government officials, toy and weapons manufacturers—we need to work together to push play and guns back into their appropriate corners. We need to keep the accoutrements of play from becoming indistinguishable from real weapons. At the same time, we need to make deadly weapons inaccessible to children. We need to keep forms of play and violence, toy guns and deadly weapons, far apart so we don’t see our children’s rhymes turning into news stories about the burning of the school.

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