SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) -- The boy and girl, slightly crouched, take aim at one another. She has a hose. He brandishes a water pistol.

For Linda Strong, it was an image that captured all the joy of being young.

When the sculptor was asked to create a fountain for a city park, it was a natural: Using her children as models, she caught in bronze their many water fights.

That was 21 years ago. Today -- to some observers who have watched gun violence escalate and children bleeding on school yards -- the piece evokes something more sinister.

So Strong is about to alter her sculpture in this art-savvy city. She plans to chisel off the boy's hand today and give him a new one, holding a garden hose rather than a gun.

"I think it's the right thing to do," she said.

Last year, following the deaths of 14 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado, there were letters to the local newspaper and calls to City Hall objecting to the fountain.

"At first I didn't consider doing anything about it," said Strong, sitting in her studio south of Santa Fe. "I just went, `Oh, listen to these people.' "

But then her fountain was vandalized. The boy was smeared with green paint, and someone wrote "no gun" on his legs. "And so I capitulated. I thought, the times have changed," she said. "I am open-minded enough to change with the times."

Strong went to the city, and the Santa Fe Arts Commission recommended the change.

Strong, 58, admits that when no water is running through the fountain -- frequently, during this summer's drought -- the boy's squirt gun looks like a pistol.

A gift to the city from Strong's late mother, the fountain was dedicated in October 1979, the International Year of the Child.

There were objections even then. In a yellowed letter-to-the-editor in one of Strong's scrapbooks, Charlene Neel refers to a recent shooting over a traffic dispute, and writes that there is "quite enough (violence) on television and on the streets of Santa Fe."

The writer -- now Charlene Neel Dye of Oxford, Miss. -- recalls that when she saw the fountain, "I was shocked. The little boy was in such an aggressive stance, and he had a gun."

The estimated cost of the alteration is about $1,700.