Things change but do they really?

Back in the 40's,50’s, and 60's political correctness did not exist. That alone made those decade worthwhile in my opinion. Other than that it was a nasty time. There were racial tensions all over the place. There was a war nobody understood or liked. Poverty was a big deal. People were being overwhelmed by technology.
It's a good that things have changed so much in the past forty plus years, isn't it?
But back then it was totally appropriate for children to play with toy guns. It was even encouraged. There were entire aisles in the toy sections of 5 and 10 devoted to hand guns, rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, etc. And where I grew up it wasn't just the boys who played cowboys and Indians, or gunfighter and war. Us girls were just as prone to violence as the boys.
The cool thing about playing guns was that you only missed when you wanted to miss, and you were only shot when you wanted to be - or everyone else insisted you were. And if you were the socially dominant one that meant never. I was never the socially dominant one. Got shot lots of times.
It was frustrating, though, to be told I had been shot when I knew for a fact that my "enemy" hadn't even managed to point their weapon at me. You see this on the old western shows all the time. There's a gunfight, and the hero fires his weapon at a forty-five degree angle to the ground. The bad guy puts his hand over his heart and falls dead. Heart attack, I guess. It's a good reason not to be a bad guy. Apparently it causes heart problems.