Kids With Guns

Today, while sitting down in Disneyland for lunch with my son, I noticed another little boy running around with his toy gun. He looked about five, and his "gun" seemed to be of the laser, Buzz Lightyear-type variety.

At one point, the little boy was pretending to shoot at the little birds eating crumbs off the ground. Then the Jedi Training Academy show started, and I noticed that he started to aim elsewhere - toward the crowd of people (mostly kids) around the stage.

My son doesn't own any toy guns, and I've consciously made the decision not to buy him anything that resembles one. (Summer was hard, what with all the gun-inspired bubble blowers around.) Yes, I'm a liberal, but I'm not necessarily anti-gun. With my son and his hyperactive tendencies, I'm all for doing what I can to help curb violence. (After all, my bouts of screaming rage is probably more than enough bad example.) Plus, I've seen enough young kids playing with toy guns pretending a little too far; holding the gun like gangsters on TV, pretending to shoot other kids they didn't like, or otherwise glorifying gun-ownership as something cool or tough or both.

I'm not sure what I'll do when he's older, when he's more conscious of other kids that he sees playing with toy guns. If he has a toy gun, is it alright for him to pretend shooting at animals and other people? Does that necessarily teach him that it's OK to pretend to hurt innocent animals and people? When we played cops & robbers when we were kids, was that OK?