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No one will rescue us. This is the way it is: Stephen's adolescence will feel like a lifetime, his fourteenth year like ten.
    I drive east from Littleton, south from Salem, late in the day, snow on the ground in the lengthening light. Some days I allow myself a good loud blubbering cry, then take a deep breath, pull over, and fix my makeup.
    Where do they come from, guns taken so easily into the hands of boys to be traded, lent, stolen, bought, and sold?
    The boy Stephen loved toy guns. He collected an arsenal of toy machine guns, all olive-drab plastic, or camouflaged green, gray, and black. He wrapped the stocks with electrical tape. He, his cousins, and his friends wore army fatigues to look like the G.I. Joe figures they amassed, figures that come with tiny guns, knives, bayonets.
    They played for hours, staging battles, building little forts in the dirt, creating front lines, and setting the tanks in staggered lines, contorting the soldiers in aggressive poses.
    If they were lucky to have some fireworks—black cats or ladyfingers—they'd stand back from their combat zone and drop the fireworks into the bunkers.
    Sometimes I was called out to witness the explosions.
    “Mom! Come see! We're gonna drop the bombs now!”
    I'd watch Stephen and his cousins touch the wicks of the ladyfingers with punks, as their fathers and unclestaught them, then flip them skillfully toward the battle scene. The little men went flying, the dust of the battles kicked up, the pieces of twigs, grass, stones scattering that were the bunkers, the boys by turns roaring with laughter and admiring the smoke, how authentic it appeared in miniature as it lingered over their destruction.
    This was play and I recognized it as such. These were boys playing army like my brothers used to, brothers now educated, prosperous citizens with sons of their own— sons who, summers, visiting the grandparents, played passionate games of army with my sons.
    By the time we moved to Brookline, I was aware of the culture's raised eyebrows regarding mothers who let their sons play with toy guns. The neighbors frowned as Stephen and his friends, in full fatigues and armed with plastic guns, moved down the sidewalk toward the park to stage life-size battles.
    I held my ground. This was play And if the neighbors didn't approve, they could read in the
Atlantic
in the autumn of 1989 an article by Bruno Bettleheim that gave language to my instincts about toy gun play.
    Bettleheim suggests that the phenomenon of young boys playing with toy guns is both harmless and necessary. They play with guns, he says, because they feel defensive.
    A previous collection of essays in
The Uses of Enchantment
discusses how children are perpetually bombarded with feelings of powerlessness at the hands of the authority figures in their lives.
    Against recent notions of eradicating violent fairy tales from children's libraries, it is better, says Bettleheim, to give them imaginary stand-ins with whom they can identify—for instance, the monsters and evil villains in the Greek myths or the Brothers Grimm.
    Through their identification with the Cyclops, his brutal destruction of Odysseus’ crew, children can imaginatively act out their anger at adults, their feelings of paralysis and despair.
    At the same time, they can witness Odysseus’ cunning as he plots the Cyclops’ demise, moves his men, in sheepskins, out of the cave to freedom. Children can be both Cyclops and Odysseus, the evil aggressor and the heroic citizen who acts on behalf of others, slays the oppressor, and saves his crew.
    Such stories, insists Bettleheim, instill little morality plays inside a child's mind. Rigorous and aggressive toy gun play is a form of such dramas.
    But what about real guns? Does my son believe that to handle and trade them, to point one at a girl and threaten her is play? By allowing, even encouraging his childhood war games, did I inadvertently set him up for this confusion?
    “It wasn't a real