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As a child my parents made a decision not to buy toy guns for my brother. Being the imaginative kid that he was, he turned everything he could get his hands on into a gun. It was a game to him and he could imagine a gun like he could imagine a spaceship or anything else. Preventing him from playing imagination games became a fruitless effort and education became a focus rather than controlling his play time.
This is a debae that has gone on for years but I wonder how significant the correlation really is. Like the three year old, many shootings involving kids and guns are a matter of opprtunity. Short of instilling an actual fear of guns in to a child and all the children they will ever be around, I am not sure that banning toys and games is they way to make the difference. Or to keep them from gun violence later on. There are a whole other list of things that bring kids to committing crimes than what toys they played with.
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