When Angelina Jolie first came to national attention, it was as a brother-kissing hellion married to Billy Bob Thornton, making her current transformation into near-holy do-gooder all the more unlikely. However, fans of old Angelina need not worry — though the actress has recently made headlines for acts as mundane as scarfing Hot Pocket calzones, she now tells W that she's passed on one of her craziest habits to seven-year-old son Maddox: buying knives!

Every family has its unique rites of passage, those generational milestones that mark a child’s growth and remind parents of their own similar experiences, years earlier. In the Jolie-Pitt household, one such event is the day a kid begins collecting daggers. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s seven-year-old son, Maddox, like many boys his age, has lately developed a fondness for guns and knives, and Jolie proudly notes that the predilection runs in the family. “My mom took me to buy my first daggers when I was 11 or 12,” she recalls. “And I’ve already bought Maddox some things. We take him to a special shop.” She emphasizes that the knife blades are dulled so they’re not dangerous, and that the purchases are accompanied by discussions about violence. But, she says, “we also talk about samurais and about the idea of defending someone as good. We talk about everything.”

Though it's been speculated before that the adoption-happy Jolie was secretly building her own, multicultural child army, we now have our first incontrovertible proof. Paparazzi, beware: though that Smith & Wesson Bowie knife that Maddox is brandishing may be dulled, the same can't necessarily be said of Zahara's garrote (or the morning stars wielded by an already ambulatory pair of Chosen Blobs). [Photo Credit: Getty Images]