August 13, 2005 - Saturday
I have to concede that I'm pretty proud of these elastic guns. They took me the better part of a couple of hours to make in the basement out of a broken street hockey stick shaft, wood that I shaped with a router, and clothes pins. I got the idea because we all of a sudden had all these elastics around from all the DVDs I was testing and the very fond memories of the elastic guns I made with my friend Petro when we were something like 11 or 12. Man were they cool. I told the boys about the idea a couple of days ago and they thought it was cool, too, and did come down in the basement while I was working on them. Amazingly, they were both very patient.

Yet, as proud as I am of having made them, I'm also rather proud to have channeled their current infatuation with guns into something that's relatively benign and also dramatically reduced the spitting noise they have to make around the house when they pretend their fingers are phasers or Star Wars blasters. I guess benign is in the eye of the beholder on this issue, but I do that that trying to squelch this infatuation is the wrong way to go because it makes it more intriguing and puts it under the proverbial table. It's much better, it seems to me, to talk about guns, talk about how to use them safely starting with these elastic guns, and how to be responsible. So, without too much fanfare, I had a little talk about how even these guns can be dangerous and that they are never to point they at each others faces. There was a more subtle implication that they shouldn't point them at each other at all, but I'm willing to play that one a little looser with the elastics. Pointing at the face, they know, will lose them the guns.


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