Posted on 11/30/2003 2:08:21 PM PST by KneelBeforeZod
'Tis the season for dangerous toy warnings. The Public Interest Research Group issued its 18th annual "Trouble in Toyland" report Tuesday, while the Consumer Product Safety Commission was releasing its list of toys cited for safety recalls. Last week was the 31st annual presentation of the "10 Worst Toys List" from WATCH -- or World Against Toys Causing Harm.
You know the drill by now: toys that might choke a kid, toys that could put You know the drill by now: toys that might choke a kid, toys that could put somebody's eye out, toys that could poison you if you chewed them up, many of the toys so obscure that you'll never see them on the shelves.
Through ever-increasing levels of vigilance, diligence and litigiousness, we Americans theoretically keep making our toys safer and safer year by year.
I was just wondering then: How do you explain the fact that the world into which we're sending our children to play is becoming more and more dangerous every day?
Is it possible we're spending so much time sweating the little things that we've lost track of the bigger picture?
Unfortunately, I have no answer to these deep philosophical questions.
What I have is a list of my own: Favorite Dangerous Toys from Childhood.
It's a compilation actually from interviews with other guys. It's amazing that we're all still alive to talk about this stuff. Just don't let your kids read this. They'd be jealous.
First off, there used to be toy guns, lots of them.
Let's set aside for a moment the issue of BB guns or pellet guns, which were always a matter of parental dispute.
There was a time when nearly every boy had a six-shooter with a holster. Most of them fired plastic bullets.
The projectiles didn't move fast enough to break a pane of glass, but they could have certainly "put somebody's eye out" under just the right circumstances.
There were toy rifles, too. Spring-loaded ones with big cartridges.
"I had the Johnny Seven," one protective father told me wistfully. "It was seven weapons of destruction in one. You could pull out the Lugar or convert it into a grenade launcher."
Neither he nor I would allow our kids anywhere near such a thing now.
"Don't forget the dart guns," said another product of a pre-PIRG childhood.
Oh, yes, the dart guns with the hard plastic darts and the rubber suction tips. When you removed the tips, you could do some real damage to your little brother, but you had to keep in mind that his chance would come, too.
I was surprised to find one of those dart guns on this year's most dangerous toy list. I suppose the Chinese are still churning them out somewhere.
There were also bows and arrows with the same suction cup tips. Every boy knew that these could be removed and the arrow point whittled down into something more useful.
My friend Pittsburgh John did this one better. He and his brothers were allowed to have toy arrows with actual steel tips that they would let fly at squirrels and rabbits.
"I don't think we ever hit anything. I'm surprised we never killed one another," said Pittsburgh John. That possibility never curtailed their use, but when the boys started using the bow and arrow inside the garage and put holes in the wall, their father had to put his foot down.
The hazard posed by other toys was only slightly more subtle.
Take the Vac-U-Form from Mattel, which used a sizzling 110-volt hotplate to mold small toys from melted sheets of styrene plastic. The Vac-U-Form heating plate was also later used for Creepy Crawlers and Thingmaker molds.
There's no telling how many ways these would flunk the safety tests today. They could burn you. They could burn the house down. There were toxic materials that let off what were probably toxic fumes.
Boy, oh, boy. What a great toy.
"A sense of danger is what makes a toy interesting," observed another very proper father.
This particular father reminded me of the most important rule about toys: You can never keep a kid from using a toy for a purpose for which it was not intended, not that this would deter either of us from trying to anticipate each and every one.
"You can make anything dangerous depending on what you do with it," he observed. "Superman capes were dangerous because then you'd jump off the garage roof, which I did."
OK, he might be a special case.
I received varied opinions on the potential danger from chemistry sets in that time period. Everyone has a story about combining the various chemicals in random ways that they thought might blow up the house. But nobody could cite any example of actually blowing something up that way.
I've got to be careful. Kids really did get hurt with some of these toys. And I don't want to diminish the work of the safety watchdogs. You can't argue with somebody trying to protect kids.
Another buddy, Scott the Jeweler, had a favorite toy cannon that he fired off in a closed garage. It didn't really shoot anything, but it made one heck of a noise, the louder the better as far as Scott was concerned. These days there's a special category on the watch lists for dangerously loud toys.
Come to think of it, Scott is a little hard of hearing.
One year for Christmas, my brother an I were given a single shot .22 Sears rifle. We set up a shooting range in the basement. Of course, it was all well controlled, and my dad doled out the ammunition. Imagine what would happen today...
The reason is mostly sold as being for "safety" but these meglomaniacs could care less about anyone's safety except for their own, and of the corrupt state that they worship.
The objective of getting rid of these toys is to quell the natural curiousity and the development of mechanical knowledge that generally comes about as a result of playing with such toys.
Then you wind up with a bunch of males that have no natural curiosity or mechanical inclination, and hence no self-sufficiency. That makes them easy to control.
When I was eight years old, I got a nice archery bow with little steel traget tips. When these arrows would hit squirrels, they would bounce off. When I was around 12, I replaced the tips with razor sharp "bear" tips. These too bounced off the sides of the squirrels - at short range. That kids' bow just did not have to power to hurt anything. If it did, I would not have had the power to draw it.
When I was in the second grade a kid poked his eye out with a pencil. He was using the pencil to get his shoe string unknotted. Do pencils come with warnings?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.