Being a parent is tough.

It’s always been tough, but it seems like things today are uniquely designed to make parenting even harder than it used to be.

But for many of us, we’re still determined to raise our kids as we were raised. Yet some people think things like toy guns and kids simply don’t mix. I hit on this earlier this week.

I’m not the only one who saw the freakout.

Kurt Schlichter, writing at our sister site Townhall, thinks that you should not just ignore the hysteria, but that you should buy your kids toy guns for Christmas.

There was recently a Twitter kerfuffle when some frustrated harridan, this time in Nebraska, blew a crone gasket because a store is selling toy guns to kids. She’s one of those Moms Demand Action types, and it’s pretty clear she’ll be demanding for a while. She frets that kids playing with toy guns “will be a problem when kids start getting them for Christmas, learn to quickly assemble their guns & bring them to school,” as if – between perverts, communists, and children of degenerate parents packing actual heat – popguns are the big threat to the kids in the schools these days.

Won’t someone please, please, think of the children? Well, we are. Which is why they must be exposed to toy guns at a young age. And toy firetrucks and race cars and airplanes and the rest of the actiony, adventury toys that begin to teach little boys to be big men. And for girls – and only girls, because only girls will ever be mothers – there are baby dolls as well. Play is play, sure, but play is also practice. It is how children begin to model themselves on adults by copying adult behaviors. And one of the most important of adult behaviors is learning to use violence against enemies in order to defend themselves, their families, their communities, and their Constitution.

Schlichter goes on to address the reasons why guns are ultimately a good thing–reasons most of our readers are already going to be more than familiar with.

Then he follows up with this:

When you let your kid play with toy guns, you teach your kid about what an adult’s responsibilities are. Fighting bad people is one of them. And your kids are going to be covering for a lot of social freeloaders when they do. Her kids Kaden nor Ashliegh will ever carry their weight by carrying an AR15 – they are on the pre-school fast track to some Ivy League conformity factory. But your kid will, because your kid is going to be awesome. You will teach your kids starting young that they must be citizen-warriors. Then you will teach them to shoot real guns, and they will want to learn, because shooting guns is what free adults do.

I don’t disagree.

I will add that by buying your kids toy guns, you have an opportunity to teach them about the responsibilities that go with it in a situation where failure has no negative outcomes.

My father required me to follow the Four Rules when I handled toy guns. I would get jerked up short if I pointed it at someone I didn’t intend to shoot or kept my finger on the trigger when I wasn’t ready to fire. Yet if I failed to follow those rules because, well, I was a kid, then there was zero chance of anyone being hurt by my mistake.

And yes, it teaches kids to act as citizens and understand that guns exist and that they’re not what the media tries to push them as.

More than that, generations of kids grew up with toy guns well before the era of the mass shooting, so the argument that they somehow lead to such things is beyond ridiculous. If anything, it seems the toxic parenting that would deny kids toy guns leads more toward those horrific events.

So yeah, I’m with Kurt. Buy your kids guns for Christmas. You’ll be glad you did.