I was understandably nervous as my girlfriend and I pulled up to the cookie cutter house in Winchester’s version of the suburbs. I never noticed the color of the PVC siding on the house, but I remember it being there. Tamukeyama Japanese maples framed the front end of the house with their drooping limbs. We were there for a birthday party. A woman – most likely in her mid thirties – met us at the end of the asphalt driveway to introduce herself. My girlfriend took the lead. She was supposed to be there, and I was simply tagging along to ensure her some sense of normalcy or escape amongst a crowd of thirty-something-year-old moms. We introduced ourselves to the hostess as Brazil’s babysitters. Carol (so we’ll call her) was very welcoming. Being the short man that I am, I took note of her long legs and the few strides it took her to cover the space between the first stepping-stone of her walkway and the first step of her ivy-coiled porch.

The sound of preschool age kids echoed throughout the neighborhood. Carol attempted to gather the kids in one place. “Okay, you all have to find the robbers and whoever finds the most gets a police badge.” The kids quickly dispersed themselves across the well-manicured lawn. Carol explained to us that he son wanted to have a cops and robbers themed birthday party. I wasn’t sure how she would pull it off – I’d never been to a “cops and robbers party” before.

An hour and too many small-talk conversations later, a small body entered the room. It was the birthday boy. He sort of crept into the room as not to disturb the adult conversationhappening in the small dinning room. He whispered in his mom’s ear, just loud enough for his mom to hear with the exception of a few others. “Hey…Hey mom?” he quizzed in question form, as kids always do. He continued, “Can I hand out the gifts?” Carole questioned him in return, “What for? We can give them their gifts before they leave.” To that he replied, “Well not everyone has a gun.” For whatever reason, I wasn’t surprised. I thought surely Carole would curve his gun excitement, but she hadn’t. Giving in to his request Carole pulled out a plastic toy gun that she’d gotten from the dollar store, almost as if to show off the fruits of her party planning labor. It looked like each party favor bag was cradling a plastic toy gun.

Incessant clicking pierced my ears as each child, simultaneously, put their trigger finger to good use. Behind black streamers, hung from the top of the doorway to look like jail bar, they began aiming the orange guns in each other’s direction. Their imaginary bullets hit every room on the first floor. The children went on in this manner for what seemed like an hour. They ran from room to room – chasing one another – drawing their weapons clumsily, aiming them and firing them at anyone at eye level. My hunger finally caught up with me so I walked into the kitchen to see what my option there were. The salad looked good. I kept a mental note for later. I turned around to reenter the dinning room and a wall of that penetrating clicking met me. BANG BANG BANG! I’d been hit many times by the nonexistent bullets. I was now the target. Take cover, I thought. I had to play along. No one wants to be the lame guy at the party.

I crouched there behind the kitchen island plotting a swift exit. I battled my urge to comply with their innocent childhood imaginations while wanting, so desperately, to physically demonstrate my opposition to the bad decision-making on the part of the parents. The kids were wired up and they were waiting. I stood tall and proclaimed “force field” as confidently as I could. I knew it was a safe alternative to shooting back. I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of shooting random children. The sound of their cocked hammers slapping their plastic frames left me uneasy. These kids were only about 5 years old, at most, and there we were handing them toy guns. What were we teaching them? I wasn’t sure if Brazil’s mom was okay with guns or not. We hadn’t talked about them, but when would that conversation come up?

Brazil was having a bit of fun, but we had reached the point in the birthday party where the children get moody and things start to slowly unravel. It made me think back to my childhood birthdays. I’d be having so much fun and then I’d get ahead of myself. My parents – only in an effort to remind me that I’m still a kid –would discipline me for my bad behavior. Looking back, this marked of the beginning of the end of every birthday party. Brazil climbed on the back of Carole’s couch and her husband immediately appeared. “Get down from there! I don’t want you climbing on my couch like that!” He scolded Brazil. Even I felt the sting of his words from the kitchen table. Brazil climbed down rather swiftly. Carole’s husband turned his back to walk away, and almost in unison, Brazil pulled out his gun and fixed its barrel on his target. His face was wrathful and his arms outstretched to ensure hitting Carole’s husband. CLICK, CLICK! He’d just shot Carole’s husband in the back.

I knew that the parents, especially Carole meant well. Their son wanted a themed party and they didn’t want to say no. I understood that just as much then as I do now, but when Brazil took his angry shot a bit of his childhood innocent left his body. It left him on the make-believe bullet he used to express his anger. Even in his youth he understood the possibility of power that rested in the palms of his little hands. In his powerless state he reached for the one thing he knew could make him feel whole again – give him control. If I was ever unsure about the guns, I made up my mind after that. I didn’t want him to play with them anymore. I wanted take him out of there, talk to him about the seriousness of guns, talk to him about the danger, but I think he knew the danger and seriousness. In his short lifetime there have been at least 28 mass shootings. Kids about his age were gunned down in school by the time he was one-year-old. Since 2013 there have been at least 188 recorded school shootings – an average of one a week. He’s grown up along side one of the most tirelessly gun violent time in American history.

We shouldn’t have allowed those kids to play around like that – taking aim and firing at one another. They were pretending to take lives in ways that have devastated our communities immensely. They were becoming desensitized to the gravity of death; the violence of violence and the truth about guns, when the real truth was that we told them it was all a game. We romanticized guns and the effects of gun for them without ever equipping them with the knowledge of the damage guns cause. I wanted to say something, but in that moment I didn’t. I sat there, like others in the room, and shared glances of disapproval without taking action. We wonder why the gun violence won’t stop. We wonder why human life isn’t valued anymore, but we ignore the times we handed them guns and told them it was okay because “boys play with guns.”