When the boys were three and five we moved to Tokyo. At our kids' Japanese preschool, boys ran around playing all sorts of rough-and-tumble war games. Even more shocking to me at the time, the teachers were actually helping kids make their own weapons out of rolled up newspapers. My oldest came home day after day with his arms full of handmade pistols, rifles, and swords. He and his playmates ran around battling one another. Our Japanese public elementary school even gave out water guns to all the kids at a summer festival every year. Every single child got one—even three-year-old siblings. The first time I saw the kids screaming with laughter as they shot at each other over and over in the schoolyard, I was surprised by how the adults could be so blasé. They didn't just tolerate the play: the teachers and even the principal helped fill the kids' guns with water and ran around shooting and battling alongside their students. They actually encouraged the children, both boys and girls, to play with toy guns.

Their relaxed attitude undoubtedly has as much to do with cultural context as anything else: today in Japan, almost no one owns firearms and there are hardly any deaths by gun. But ever since living abroad in a society where young kids are allowed so many outlets for their energy, I have come to believe that one of the secrets of Asian boys' self-regulation is the way that aggressive play is seen as a normal stage of childhood, rather than demonized and hidden out of sight.

In contrast, in the U.S. we vilify children for even being interested in playing with guns. In the past six months alone, a little boy in Massachusetts was given detention and forced to write a letter of apology for having a tiny, Lego toy gun on a school bus; a five year old in Maryland was given ten days of suspension for having a toy gun at school, interrogated for so long he wet his pants in the principal's office; elementary school students in Washington were suspended for shooting off Nerf guns that their teacher had actually asked them to bring in for an experiment in probability; and in California, an elementary school announced a plan to "buy back" toy guns in exchange for books. Little boys bear the brunt of our panic over toy weapons, but girls are not immune either: a five-year-old girl in Pennsylvania was suspended from school and made to undergo psychiatric evaluation when she threatened to shoot a classmate with a toy Hello Kitty soap bubble gun—a toy she hadn't even brought to school.

We didn't always used to frown upon weapon play; children of the 1950s grew up steeped in television shows showing gun-toting heroes like the Lone Ranger, and toy soldiers and cowboy costumes were common playthings. But societal panic intensified in the wake of a spate of tragic school shootings in the 1990s, and a shift towards zero tolerance policies and regulating how children should play has been steadily increasing ever since. We've become so panicked about toy weapons that we are rewriting them out of our past. Jay Mechling, a professor at the University of California, Davis, recounts in The Journal of Play how surprised he was that an icon of postwar 1950s American childhood—the Daisy BB gun—was utterly absent, along with toy guns, when he visited the Strong National Museum of Play. The Daisy and toy replica guns had been nominated for inclusion in the museum's National Toy Hall of Fame multiple times, but protests against them by parents and teachers prevailed.* Toy guns were systematically being erased from the American cultural history of childhood.