Is films with very young kids using guns/weapons a step too far?

Hit-Girl is going to make the Daily Mail schit kittens.

The British tabloids will most likely have a field day with the character. They'll ignore the fact that her depiction is as much of a challenge to the sexualisation of any female icon by society, or that that she has the films' best scenes with her on-screen father Damon Macready (played lovingly by Nicolas Cage), which manage to be sweet, endearing and blackly comic.
I'd already heard that Chloe Moretz is a revelation as Hit-Girl/Mindy Macready, but I had no idea exactly how fantastic her performance would be. She plays the young daughter with the same adeptness that she portrays the superhero assassin and, my god, is ‘assassin' the word. The problem is she's 12. Just her age raises an issue, but her performance is a work of perfection, never feeling mawkish or twee, and will call upon a thousand comparisons (and rightly so) to Natalie Portman in Leon. There's still going to be quite a debate arising from her performance, though.