What About Pointed Sticks?

This morning as I ran through our neighborhood park, I saw a four-year-old boy with a baseball bat. He stood "en garde" as his mother watched patiently. He was not wielding a baseball bat or any sort of sports equipment, he was threatening with cold steel. It would be easy enough to blame Johnny Depp for this outburst, but I know different.
Fifteen years ago, we were finishing up a visit to Disneyland. My wife was the woman I was dating with all due seriousness, and I was unfamiliar with the ways of her family. On the way down Main Street, we stopped in one last shop to find the perfect souvenir for her young cousin. We walked through aisles of toys and t-shirts and postcards and candy looking for just the right thing, with this admonition: "No weapons. He's way too interested in guns and light sabers." Maybe something educational. At last we found a Mickey Mouse slide rule. It did multiplication, division and converted Fahrenheit to Celsius and the answer would appear in Mickey's eyes. The perfect thing for the young scientist.
We made the long drive up Highway 5 feeling very confident in our purchase. The day after we returned to Oakland, we dropped by her cousin's house to drop off the gift. Her aunt and uncle were most impressed with the care that we had taken to deliver such an appropriate token of our brief trip to the House of Mouse. Her cousin unwrapped it, pushed Mickey's head all the way to one end of the slide and held it aloft, "A sword!" he cried and ran out into the back yard to slay dragons and thieves and stormtroopers and evil doers of all stripes.
Years later when our own son began to develop these aggressive impulses, his preschool teacher let us know that all the boys she had encountered in her many years of watching boys form that eventually they all needed to experience what she referred to as "Power Extenders." Sometimes they were guns, sometimes they were swords, and sometimes just pointed sticks.