A case for war on the playground

If you don't give a boy that plastic Uzi he wants, he'll pick up a stick and "shoot" at his play foes.

This is an unfortunate glitch in our human DNA, right?

Whatever your politics on guns and boys, here's a new scientific opinion, from Britain of all places: Playing with toy weapons is healthy for boys. (Link here.)

There's of course an educational side to this. Boys are drawn to science and math because their brains are fascinated by spatial relationships -- including the arc of an arrow or a spear as it seeks its target. Interest in the forces of thrust and gravity on objects is natural for the male of a species that has always had to use its wits and knowledge instead of its physical abilities to hunt down food.

Parents should realize that telling a boy to suppress those instincts imperils his psyche. Interest in hunting, after all, is not the same as interest in violence. Only an out of control nanny culture (link here) would conflate the two.

(Pix: 11-year-old Alabama boy Jamison Stone killed this 1,051 pound wild pig near Delta, Ala., on May 3, 2007.)