Dear White People,
Asia is not just China.
Regards,
A Pedant.
1 Like
We used to call those âtacos.â
1 Like
4 Likes
That seems extremely unrealistic. Kids need to be educated how to stay safe. Trying to shelter them is a losing battle. And legal punishments for possession will work about as well as the War on Drugs has, which is to say it wonât but it will have negative unintended consequences.
I mean I get where youâre coming from and sympathize. But re-bottling genies just isnât how the world works.
Thatâs not going to work. At 9, 10, 11 kids think they are immortal and the other kids are just props in their life movies. When I was that age we all had slingshots and knives and BB guns, played mumblety-peg in the school yard, played a âchickenâ game with slingshots I donât even want to describe, ignored the safety protocols our dads taught us when shooting the BB guns pretty much indiscriminately, and kids got hurt. A lot. However, it was minor hurt, eg the occasional knife in your foot, though it is a miracle I didnât see more major injuries with the slingshots and the BB guns. (One good friend managed to blow his eyebrows off when trying to make firecrackers out of fulminate of mercury. A day later I would have been with him, but he decided to start without me. We were 10. Kids that age donât have judgment.)
If they have these things kids are going to use them with only the slightest self-control, and shoot them at one another, either intentionally or out of stupidity. If they are only a dollar or two and available at the local 7-11 extremely young kids are going to have them. What helped with the BB guns and the slingshots and the hunting knives is that they got harder for kids to get their hands on. I think that will be harder for these crossbows, but honestly someone should try, and soon.
I honestly think parents of young children and elementary schoolteachers should be panicking about this (and not about nonfunctioning toy guns or walking 3 blocks home unaccompanied or the evil internet or any of the other silly things parents and teachers freak out about nowadays). This is worse than Irwin Mainwayâs Johnny Switchblade and Bag OâGlass.
Okay. How?
Hereâs the thing though, these toothpick crossbows arenât using anything kids lacked access to before. It will be a fad, with a slight elevation in injuries, and then fade away as kids move on to something else in a year or two. I donât see how anyone can stop that on a systemic level. Parents can intervene with their own kids, but limiting access to something so easy to build, I donât see how thatâs possible.
I doubt panic is ever a constructive reaction, but YMMV. I agree the rest of the list except the toy guns. Iâm not saying they shouldnât have them, but trigger happy cops like to shoot kids with them.
Ban imports. Ban sales in stores and on ebay. Do whatever it was we did with Jarts.
Unlike drugs, there isnât enough profit in these things to support dealers hanging around schoolyards. Some kids might still get them, but most kids only get what they can get cheaply and easily, if the critical mass of these things in the wild is low the number of injuries will be manageable.
It means responsible adults will also have trouble getting them, but (a) good, and (b) the overlap of âresponsible adultâ and âcanât live without a toothpick crossbowâ is pretty small. If youâre an adult, and want a tiny portable crossbow, design and build one. And keep it away from your kid until sheâs old enough to design and build one for herself.
3 Likes
Thatâs my point. These wonât be hard for teens to build, and if teens are building them, younger kids will get ahold of them. Iâm game to try your way - those neodymium balls were evil - but I predict failure and that the fad will burn out quickly anyway.
1 Like
I hope youâre wrong. Since seeing the story in the Graun Iâve had a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach about these thingsâŚand the fact that my first reaction was âIâd like to try oneâ just made it worse.
2 Likes
So do I. And maybe Iâm overestimating kidsâ resourcefulness because those in my family a social circle tend to be creative thinkers. But it seems to me that between the internet and shifts in culture from passive consumer to active making and modding, kids are the most capable theyâve been in generations, which is on the whole a good think I think, but also a double-edged sword to be certain. I just know that when I was a kid making things made me a geek and not the norm, but kids these days donât seem to make as much of a distinction there anymore.
I love how the bulk of this story is how terrible these are and we absolutely donât want them to proliferate, but then closes with: âand if you want one, hereâs how to make one for yourselfâ
1 Like
you can buy these from the Boing Boing store as a matter of fact
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
