What a great toy! I would have loved to have one of those! It’s kind of like Transformers with a rifle becoming a pistol. Man! this is a little boy’s dream here!
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Because even though we all played with toy guns, and learned very early to shoot real ones, it was common knowledge that it is wrong to actually shoot another person. Somehow we were able to handle that. Of course now it is believed that playing with toy guns and war toys and having real guns leads to violent crime. That relationship was not evident for my generation, or the five or six generations before us. Perhaps it is really not the guns themselves causing all the evil?
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Wait, over twenty posts about old gun adverts and I’m the first to post this?
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Might have been plastic, but it was almost certainly sturdier than a lot of the crap you see today. A lot of the toys I had in the early 80s were close to a solid block of cast plastic, today it’s all thin walled junk that will snap if you look at it funny.
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if this is too modern for your child’s sensibilities, they can always play with the toy guillotine:
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Can’t believe no one’s posted “Snake Plissken: The Formative Years” yet.
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I wouldn’t characterize keeping children in a state of ignorance regarding something that has an innate allure and the ability to take a life when mistreated as kindness.
It’s but one symptom of the gradual and continual infantalizing of humans who are not yet 18.
If all they are exposed to is the cartoonish depiction of firearms in popular culture, they lack an understanding and respect for the potential destructive ability conferred by the misuse of a firearm.
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I remember playing with jarts when I was a kid. They were always very carefully played with, though we probably played with horseshoes with about the same amount of care. No one downrange of the thrower, always careful where they were aimed…
Seems like you could get into about as much trouble with them as with a game of darts in a bar. (read: a hell of a lot of trouble if people weren’t taking common-sense precautions, and otherwise the occasional chance of really bad accidents)
(then again, according to wikipedia, an average of 763 people per year were injured by lawn darts per year in the US between 1980 and 1988… wonder what the average was for darts? All I come up with in google is OSHA information, which is completely different.)
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I can’t believe you invoked the Mall Ninja without linking it:
Give it a read everyone–you won’t be disappointed.
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I will say, my father is a military history buff, and a collector of antique firearms. (Also a sometimes hunter, but it’s pretty clear based on their success rate that ‘Hunting Trips’ are really code for ‘Getting drunk with the Uncles for a week, away from the family’)
From the time we were young, my dad made sure that because guns were in the house that the ones that actually could still fire (maybe half, tops) were all locked up. When we got older, we had mandatory firearm safety training. Those that wanted could come with on hunting trips (nobody really did).
Well, it took us approximately until age 12 to figure out where to find the keys to the gun cabinet. But, we were pretty well behaved with that information. It wasn’t until I was 20 that I let one of my friends handle any of the weapons, and only because he actually had just become a full-fledged marine a year before.
That isn’t to say there was no shenanigans. It wasn’t until I was 34 that I copped to having brought gun powder into my freshman year science class. I’m actually kinda proud of that, after I found out that my science teacher was still telling that story to kids over 10 years after I graduated high school. Lol.
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Sounds like an efficient way to arm your opponents with machine guns.
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I really wanted an Easy Bake Oven one year…and it was purchased I saw it…but Dad made Mom take it back because it would make me gay.
So, I got these type of things…and GI Joe Dolls.
Well it worked…in a way . I ended up marrying a former Marine.
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You’ll shoot your eye out kid!
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My dad has a dimple on the top of his foot, where a lawn dart pegged him to the lawn like a bug in the entomology department. Needless to say, my brother and I only ever received NERF toys when it came to anything that was supposed to be thrown or shot (barring baseballs, of course. Forbidding those is unpatriotic).
Seriously, playing lawn darts looks about as safe as playing with kunai knives. Whoever thought it was a good idea to market “Sharp, heavy, sturdy projectiles meant to be thrown hard and stick in the ground” to kids?
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And yet my perception is that it’s adults over 18 who are being infantilised, and that kids are being encouraged to join the adult world as soon as they have cash. Weird, innit?
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My dad is sitting next to me having childhood flashbacks. Boinboing: it’s a family experience.
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Should have explained it was to cook the squirrels you killed with your new red ryder.
Um, cause teh gays are antigunner hand caught raw squirrel eating sumthins.
I wanted this gadget gun, my neighbor had parts of one, but also had a bloody easy bake oven. C’mon freaking real cake any time day or night in a house ruled by a hippy earth muffin whole wheat veggie mom is living the dream.
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I remember that ages ago, Mad Magazine had a kid show parody that among other things had an ad that told the tots something like “Wouldn’t you love to wipe Commie Russia off the map with this all new Death 6000?” I now realize that it must have been based on this.
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