Should kids be playing with toy weapons?

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It's not just kids. Here is Aus we just had two people shot by police in a nightclub. They were attending a Saints and Sinners fancy dress ball. The guy went dressed as The Joker and had a toy gun that looked nothing like a real one. He showed it to security before he entered. Someone at the ball called the police. Forty armed response police went to the nightclub. Security told them they had seen the gun and it was a toy and said they would go and talk to the guy. The police ignored them, burst into the club and shot the guy (who did not raise the supposed weapon) and his partner. The guy was shot in the chest and his partner in the leg.
That's the problem with guns, even toy ones. The police are happy to shoot first, ask questions later.

The problem is BAD police NOT toy weapons. In the western days everyone carried guns & there were barely any gun fights despite what the media portrays so I think there's other factors to violence than the guns themselves that should be addressed. I see no problem with letting kids play Cowboys & Indians as long as then guns can be identified easily as toys. Police NEED to be trained to handle situations with potentially toy guns that don't involve shooting 1st & asking questions later.

If they want to play with them, sure.

Isn't that description the very definition of ad hominem?

Not in any sense. You should probably refer to a dictionary definition for clarification.

Hmm. You write that the Daily Mail has "the same credibility as The National Enquirer" without substantiation, but your characterization of the Mail isn't a description of the logical fallacy known as an ad hominem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem )?

Okey-dokey, then.

Yeah they should play with guns again. Autism prevalence rates have skyrocketed since that type of play has been discouraged .

If a publication, or for that matter a person cites an anonymous source, they make the issue of their credibility an inherent part of the discussion. The credibility of The Daily Mail is a matter of record, and based on that extensive record I don't find them credible.

If I said The DM smells bad, that would be a fallacious ad hominem.

The ones that are sold now are a far cry from those of yesteryear. Ever heard of the Austin Magic Pistol? You probably wont believe it when I describe it, so feel free to google. The Austin Magic Pistol was a red plastic gun that shot ping pong ball. The part you wont believe is how this was done. The back end of the gun contained calcium Carbide (CaC2) crystals. These will chemically react with water (which you got by spitting to prime the gun) to make acetylene (C2H2, that's correct, the stuff they put in torches to cut up cars). The trigger was linked to a flint that ignited the acetylene. This produced a hot jet of flame and ejected the ping pong ball...or could be used to scorch your sisters nose.

I'm not sure when they sold them, but given the art on boxes I've seen my guess is mid 40s to early 60s.

Edited to add: The AMP is a highly desirable item on the collectible toy market, even though most of them no longer have enough CaC2 left to be functional. Some other eye popper toys that would never be sold in our litigation happy country today have included a nuclear physics set that had actual Uranium and a glass blowing set--in 1908 this was an essential skill for a chemist to develop.

YES!! ! THATS IT!! ! I love how it says "Safe radioactive materials" no such thing we now know.

Also the Uranium made it a *VERY* expensive toy so not to many kids got one.

Last edited by drwho222 on 11 Jul 2017, 4:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

As long as they know it's just fantasy and that they shouldn't be shooting or slashing people up for real, I don't see the issue. What are airsoft and LARPing? Basically people playing with toy weapons in an organized manner.

Kids should be taught the difference between toy guns and real guns, and they should be taught how to respect real guns and not treat them as toys. I think this type of education should be mandatory for anyone who wants to use a real gun.

That all said, there's also a line between airsoft and Nerf guns. Airsoft shouldn't be played without proper eye protection, and paintball especially shouldn't be played without eye and skin protection. Airsoft and paintball may not be as dangerous as real guns, but they're definitely more dangerous than Nerf guns.

Last edited by mr_bigmouth_502 on 11 Jul 2017, 4:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.

lostonearth35 wrote:

...I'm very bewildered by Americans' obsession with guns....

You and me both, and I'm a native born American born and raised. If you ask some, if you take the guns out of peoples hands then ISIS will be running this country in under a month. I'm always waiting for the next mass shooting to make us look like crazos in the eyes of the rest of the civilized world, but I guess the sociopath in the White House does that on a daily basis these days. Problem is the Genie is out of the bottle and I see no way of putting him back in.