Congratulate us! We got our first gun!

E just got back from a week-long vacation to Mumbai. He's been home only a few hours and I'm realizing that I'd kind of missed being a parent.
The first thing he showed me was a new dart-gun he managed to coax our aunt to buy. It's called the Maverick-something-or-other, and it's hideous. It's the first toy of its kind he's got. We sternly discourage anything resembling a weapon in this house.
He was so excited about it, he went on about how he and his friends had a 'war' - which a friend's sister started (typical! blame the woman!) and how his gun was powerful enough to break down their 'base' and how they had makeshift sandbags 'just like they did at the Grand Hyatt in Mumbai...'
It's silly to go back to my own childhood when I try to understand him. Every generation has its own nightmarish experiences that later become part of history.
E's talking in military terms, his slow shift to thinking that to strike out at another is strength...all of this upsets me. But...I wonder if maybe it would be more nurturing to let him learn everything, and teach him to use it positively. Yes, there are bad guys in the world...in fact there's a friggin large number of them! E needs to learn to handle them.
These days...nobody uses the phrase 'too young' anymore. No one is too young to do anything, it seems. Watch a terrorist attack live, have a baby, smoke a cigarette, start earning...
I know so many parents who take their kids to movies that I would balk at letting E see. I don't like video games and PlayStation because they zombi-fy kids.
But our not liking it doesn't really mean E does not have access to it. It's the same with the dart-gun. E would never even have asked for it here in Pune. But he's got that boy-thrill at having it, at the feeling of power one gets from being armed for the first time.
I don't like it. But I don't want his eyes closed against it.
Ah parenting...how I have missed your worrisome, complicated self.