I don’t know about you, but I’m a boy. Well, I was one, back in the day. I played guns all the time, perfecting the art of finger shooting, quick draw and dying while diving in a pool. I watched a lot of gun TV: The Rifleman, The WIld, Wild West, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and more. My favorite movies featured gunplay. And I read a lot of books about war, cowboys and Indians, hunting, spies and exploration. (NB: The Hardy Boys were pussies.) As TTAG’s Brad Kozak pointed out in a recent editorial, the gun gestalt taught me a lot about right and wrong. Today, Gun Culture for Boys™ is still thriving. There’s a huge range of Nerf and Airsoft guns and any number of hyper-violent, hyper-realistic video games. Rap music is suffused with romantic gun references. Still, something’s missing: gun-celebratory novels. At literacy levels below Tom Clancy (yes there is such a thing), boy’s books about gunplay are awfully thin on the ground. Is that a major contributory factor for falling levels of pre-adult male literacy?
