Besides being oddly mesmerizing to watch the boy repeatedly take his finger off the trigger only to put it back on again — Higgins says the boy "has terrible trigger discipline"— the video represents how much Syria has changed since before its revolution began in March 2011.
As Karl Sharro details in the Syria Deeply post "He Provided Them with Bananas," Syrian people lived with a "deep sense of shame" for decades because they had to "submit to an all-knowing authority, one that cannot be questioned."
From Sharro:
It was the lack of possibility, the closed doors of the future. It was the bureaucratic machine that reduced every citizen to a robot and then treated him or her accordingly.
The video below flips that script as a boy no older than 5 or 6 has a gun in the mouth of a statue of the man who ruled Syria with an iron fist for three decades, Hafez al-Assad. Hafez later passed the reins to his son and current president Bashar.
No matter what becomes of the country — Al Qaeda-linked jihadist group Jabhat al Nusra controls the rebel-held half of Aleppo — it's clear that "there will be no return to the old ways," as Sharro notes. "After all the sacrifices, the people of Syria won’t go back to living with their shame."