It’s Nerf or Nothing

I’m not a pacifist. I think that violence is the only answer to certain questions. Like the interwar writer and peace campaigner Storm Jameson said about the Nazis, I accept that some things are worth killing for.

But that doesn’t mean that I approve of or like militarism and the glamorisation of violence that we – and especially our kids – seem to be subjected to. Violence is an evil that is occasionally necessary.

As a general rule, Elvira and I have discouraged our boys from having toy guns. Not entirely out of explicit principle – I still remember my boyhood friend in the 1980s who was kicked out of the Woodcraft Folk for drawing a picture of a cannon, which seems to be a matter of putting the cart before the horse – but at least partly because we don’t want them to develop a casual attitude towards the prospect of killing others.

Because that’s what an awful lot of what boys get exposed to through child-oriented media seems to promote. Most of the cartoons that they choose to watch and the video games they choose to play involve fighting of some sort.

Also speaks like a 1930s gangster - WHY?

OK, you expect stuff like that in things like Ben 10 but when the bloody Care Bears are apparently referencing the Vietnam War (or rather films about the Vietnam War) by shouting “fire in the hold” and “incoming!” there’s surely some cultural mutation that’s gone a bit wrong.

Alright, little kids are not likely to get the references (and when did “referencing” things become clever in itself anyway?) but why make the reference to war or war films other than to consciously or unconsciously normalise and make attractive the idea of war?

I grew up as a little militarist through no direct fault of my parents but just by exposure to a pro-violence culture. I thought the Falklands War was the coolest thing ever, primarily because we (Britain) won. In pretty much any scenario, to me and my friends, the baddies were the Germans – despite the Second World War having ended more than 30 years before we were born.

What scientists look like

The hangover from these assumptions are still present today. Watch any cartoon. If there’s a mad or evil scientist in it, he will have a German accent. And he may well be wearing a monocle, which is a cliché that was outdated even by 1939.

Thankfully, we are little more careful today than to casually demonise other races and nationalities to our children. An Afghanistan or Iraq-based version of “Battle Comic” is unimaginable.

Nevertheless, kids are still fed the idea that there is such a thing as cannon-fodder which can be “destroyed” (note the regular use of phrases about “destroying” someone in cartoons as a blatant euphemism for “killing” them) without consequence. It’s just that today it’s robots or aliens or something else non-human that’s been placed outside our moral community, not Japs or Krauts.

To be honest, I think it would do more good to children to show one of these “destroyed” aliens screaming in pain, shitting itself and crying out for its mother than sanitising death to the point where they’re indifferent to it. But instead, we just see the fallen body flash and then disappear – if we even think about it at all. This indifference was parodied to great effect in the first Austin Powers movie, where we saw the henchman’s wife finding out he’d been killed.  

This all brings me on to Nerf guns. Our kids got some of these for Xmas. I wish they hadn’t. Now, if the people who got them are reading this – in no way am I having a go at you about this. Guns are appropriate and popular presents for boys. That’s just the world we live in, whether we like it or not. They were always going to end up with toy guns, it was just a matter of when. The kids loved them and I’m not going to deny that even I enjoyed playing with them.

It looked like this

I had toy guns when I was a young ‘un, ranging from cowboy revolvers to replica M16s. I particularly remember my own Mauser automatic pistol – which, being German, was inherently an evil weapon.

Apart from spud guns though, I don’t think they fired anything. Nerf guns fire sponge darts with a soft plastic tip. They use what appears to be the same mechanism as used by air guns (I stand to be corrected if that’s wrong – it’s not like I do any research here...). They propel those darts with a surprising amount of force. If you got shot with one, it would sting a bit.

Now I’m sure Nerf and other “airsoft” stuff is safe enough to comply with legal standards and that you’d really have to be doing something stupid in order to have somebody’s eye out with one. You can certainly throw a ball, or a toy car, or a rocking horse at someone’s head and do them just as much if not more harm as you can by shooting them with a Nerf gun.

But have you seen the adverts for Nerf stuff? They feature paramilitarised American teenagers – old enough to impress kiddies and young enough to frighten the grown-ups – romping around, Call of Duty-style, discharging blasts from their rapid-fire, multi-barrelled plastic guns, and then proclaiming in a voice laced with menace that “it’s Nerf or nothing”.

If this was taking place in real life, they would – of course – be shooting at each other, or unwilling nerds. But that can’t be shown on TV. And nobody is likely to get very excited about shooting tin cans any more.

So do you know how they’ve got round that problem? Bloody zombies.

Yes, Nerf “zombie strike” weapons are for shooting zombies: kids today’s Germans.

Zombies offer the advantage of having the precise same anatomy as a human being whilst it is nevertheless unambiguously ok to shoot them because they’re evil or because it’s self-defence or something. This is a Nerf machete. Only for killing zombies, obviously.

In no way does this desensitive kids to violence...

And so Nerf takes us over the line from cartoon violence into real world violence where we go around pointing guns at human-shaped objects that we understand to be incapable of suffering and/or deserving of death. And when we pull the trigger, we don’t just get a feeble “rat a tat” noise like we used to – we launch something that behaves very much like a bullet.