In one of the first-ever studies of young children’s play with toy guns, a psychologist found that the more a child plays with toy guns, the more real aggression he displays.

The catharsis argument — which supposes that playing with toy guns will allow children to vent aggressive feelings in a pretend way and thus minimize real aggression — was shown once again to be false.

"The more a child plays with toy guns, the more real aggression and the less pretend aggression will be exhibited," writes researcher Malcolm Watson, chairman of the psychology department at Brandeis University.

Watson notes that many children will make guns out of sandwiches and other everyday objects. "That should not be a cause for a great deal of concern," he writes. "But parents need not facilitate this tendency in children nor demonstrate their approval of it by buying toy weapons. ...Clearly, parents do not need to foster every tendency their children display, and, I believe ...that children’s penchant for toy guns is a tendency we should try to control."

Watson’s study was published in the journal Early Education and Development, Vol. 3 No. 4. The study found that "the strongest predictor of real aggression was the amount of physical punishment that parents reported using. The more a parent spanked a child, the more real aggression the child demonstrated." Toy gun play was the next highest predictor of aggressive behavior.