Manufacturers, fearful that toy guns could go the way of toy cigarettes, have chosen the head-in-the-sand approach. Don’t look and maybe the problem, in this case the growing number of children – and adults – killed by police officers who mistake their toy guns for the real thing will go away.
Save for retired Army Sgt. Josh Dagnese, gun-store owners approached by Monitor reporter Alyssa Dandrea to discuss the sale of toy guns, including virtual replicas of real weapons, declined to speak.
There are two categories of guns commonly, and wrongly, referred to in the press as toys.
The first are true toys akin to the cap pistols of old, and plastic or metal copies of real guns that don’t shoot, shoot soft projectiles or squirt water. The second category includes BB and pellet guns. The former can, as mothers typically warn, take out an eye. The latter, depending on power, can kill squirrels and other small creatures, and conceivably cause serious or even fatal harm to humans.
Dagnese, owner of the Village Gun Store in Whitefield, said he won’t sell BB and pellet guns to just anyone since they should be used with supervision and could be mistaken for more dangerous weapons.
Many major gun makers, including Ruger in Claremont and Sig Sauer in Epping, sell both real guns and pellet guns that are virtually identical.
Sig Sauer Vice President Adam Painchaud declined to describe his company’s products to Dandrea, saying, “I don’t think we have any interest in discussing that.” The fact is, on its website Sig Sauer brags about the similarity between the pellet guns and the real thing: “The P226ASP quietly delivers unprecedented access to more authentic training practice with original model weight and dimensions. Engineered with a rifled steel barrel, metal frame and full metal blowback slide, it’s every ounce an uncompromised SIG.”
It’s no wonder that police officers, who must make split-second decisions with their lives on the line, can’t tell the two apart until after the shooting is over.
Painchaud’s response, given the death of so many children and his company’s role as the manufacturer of the weapon used recently in the nation’s largest mass shooting, is the act of an irresponsible corporate citizen.
Sig Sauer, in addition to selling weapons, trains members of law enforcement and others in their use. It is, in a sense, also in the education business, and the public and law enforcement badly need more education about the proper use of real and fake guns.
Federal law demands that toy weapons be easily distinguished from real ones by requiring that the latter have a blaze-orange tip. But like many teens who want to pretend they have the real thing, Tamir Rice, the 15-year-old Cleveland boy shot a heartbeat or two after the arrival of a trigger-happy police officer, removed them. Legislation that would require that toy weapons be made in bright colors was filed by California Sen. Barbara Boxer last year but was killed in committee..
Save for nonlethal weapons sold to law enforcement or the military for training purposes, toy guns and their BB and pellet version should be clearly identified in ways that can’t be easily removed.
Anyone in their right mind knows that pointing a toy weapon at police can be a suicidal act, but that’s the point. Too often those pointing the fake weapon are mentally ill or armed with the unformed brains of youth.