Explain this one to me, too. Please? Because I’ve been wracking my brain since it was first published, and I can’t figure this out. Even a little bit.
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. (Phila. Inquirer) March 30 - In a trend of growing concern to police, more and more real guns are being painted in fluorescent colors that make them look like toys.
At the same time, growing numbers of toy guns that fire pellets are being produced to look just like lethal weapons.
“You can’t tell the real from the fake anymore,” Camden County Prosecutor Joshua Ottenberg said. “It’s literally a miracle that some kid here hasn’t been shot dead yet.”
On [last] Thursday night, a distraught man carrying a fake gun closed down the Walt Whitman Bridge for nearly four hours.
Troopers seized the man’s “very realistic” weapon after he surrendered. “It looked like a SIG Sauer, just like the ones we carry,” said Sgt. Stephen Jones, a New Jersey State Police spokesman. “There’s no telling what could have happened if he had pulled it out.”
Last month, an FBI bulletin warned police across the country about a new process that can produce or tint weapons in garish colors. Under the headline “Not a toy gun,” the bulletin featured a dozen photos of guns with candy-colored finishes.
Often, the colors are used to appeal to women and young sport shooters.
Smith & Wesson offers the LadySmith, a pink, .38-caliber revolver designed for women. Remington sells a child-size shotgun decorated with pink and black swirls. Crickett, a Pennsylvania company, sells a .22-caliber rifle for youths – the Davey Crickett – that’s red, white and blue.
For $200, Jim Astle, owner of Jim’s Gun Supply in Wisconsin, will color a gun to the owner’s whim. Last year, he got international attention after he customized an AK-47 in Pepto-Bismol pink. Emblazoned on the gunstock was the children’s cartoon character Hello Kitty.
“One of our soldiers in Iraq wanted it as a surprise present for his wife so she could shoot it at the range,” Astle said.
This month, Lauer Custom Weaponry of Wisconsin introduced a line of gun-customizing kits. It’s called the Bloomberg Collection, after New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who urged passage of a 2006 law that makes selling, possessing or using gun-paint kits a crime in the five boroughs.
The Lauer kits come in Manhattan Red, Bronx Rose, Staten Island Yellow, Queens Green and Brooklyn Blue.
Steve Lauer, who said militaries and governments around the world used his DuraCoat process to protect guns from corrosion, is miffed that Bloomberg has called his product unsafe.
To goad the mayor, he said, a caricature of Bloomberg’s face comes on the barrel.
Bloomberg condemned Lauer’s company last week, calling the colored guns “a slap in the face to our men and women in the Police Department.”
Bloomberg said the guns would be confused with toys.
“A police officer won’t be able to tell the difference,” he said. “It’s a tragedy in the making.”
“Let us just pray that nobody gets killed over this. This is an outrage,” Bloomberg said, singling out Lauer. “It defies imagination how anybody could be so venal.”
Legislators in Nassau County, N.Y., introduced legislation last week to ban the colorization kits.
Law enforcement officials also are not laughing.
Read the rest here.
I guess they’re not laughing. Because these weapons are bound to get someone killed. You know, we always hear about how gun manufacturers are good, responsible corporate citizens, that they should not be held accountable for the actions of those who use their ‘ttols” to cause murder and mayhem. So tell me if the guy who created the “Hello Kitty AK-47,” also known as the “HK-AK” also falls into that category. Explain to me the reason why a legitimate, law-abiding gun owner (and that’s all of them, right?) would need to buy a gun that looks like a toy.
And what kind of parent buys an “air-soft” gun for their kid that looks exactly like a real, live assault weapon? So that when their thirteen-year-old is running around the neighborhood with his “toy” – which is what they do in my neck of the woods – playing “capture the flag” with his adolescent buds, he looks like he’s toting the real thing. A “toy” that looks real enough to maybe get him shot, by a police officer, or by a nervous neighbor.
It’s just a matter of time, folks. And then who gets the blame?
Filed under: General outrage, Guns, News & commentary, Peace testimony
Oh my – horrifying, just horrifying. Rome before the fall, that is what I often think.
The blur between what is real and what is not, grows ever more blurred and we wonder why third graders are plotting against their teacher, why we can ignore Darfur, why there is not enough outrage against the war and so forth.
It is a necessity during wartime that the normal human horror over killing be suppressed as much as possible, and this is part of that. Participation in any war, let alone a falsely predicated and immoral war like the GWOT does irreparable harm to a country’s moral fiber. Any policemen or civilians killed because of this should be counted as part of the collateral damage of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The guilt heaped upon the Bush misadministration just keeps getting piled higher and higher.
Yup. War culture. Pink guns and cage fighting and such.
SBT It is a necessity during wartime that the normal human horror over killing be suppressed as much as possible
That… AND children and women are specifically being “targeted” for war training via the culture. First we had the violent video games that were mostly played by our young boys. Now we are looking to market killing to girls and women. Military needs recruits. Prisons need more inmates. And child criminals will justify ever more restrictive government policies.
What if… we could actively train our youth in principles and practice of non-violence and had them spending hours and hours playing non-violent video games instead??? What if every child in school was memorizing passages from Gandhi and MLK like
““…it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor.
So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.”
Would we have a different world? Would we acheive MLK’s Dream?
The liquor store sells a bottle of tequila shaped like that. I kid you not. Gives a whole new meaning to “taking a shot,” and I have not the least bit of interest in that one.
THAT is perverse. Seriously.
Actually, there’s nothing really new about the prettification of weaponry, whether it’s jewels on a sword, intricate tooling on a dagger, or platinum plating on a revolver. What’s new is that this is increasingly a mass market phenomenon—the consumerisation of weapons as fashion accessories.
As Franiam says, it points to a decademt civilisation in decline.
Yeah. Put a diamond necklace on a warthog, though, and it’s still a warthog.
I would just like to point out that while this might be further increasing problems in our country, we still have to look at the fact that our law enforcement officers have become, shall i say, a little bit to trigger happy. Shooting children with toy guns should not be the first option that a cop should take. It shouldn’t be shoot first and ask questions later, which we have seen, at least in New York, seems to happen quite often. Furthermore, after a police officer has deemed it necessary to shoot(hopefully after a bunch of “Put the gun down”) a kill shot should not be the first shot taken. Most people do not like pain and/or act well when faced with it, so shotting at a leg rather than in the chest would be just as reasonable.
Gin: I absolutely agree. How many times have we heard that same story lately, a shoot first approach. At BEST, folks get tasered as a first resort. And, I also think the militarization of our culture, brought about by a “war without end” approach to foreign policy and the so-called “war on terror,” makes the use of violence much more acceptable.
On the other hand, as the uncle of a newly christened police officer, I can tell you that many cops are feeling outmanned and outgunned. Street gangs in the big cities are well organized and well armed, and not much is being done to disarm them.
I know this is an old blog but I had to respond, I am a firefighter in a big city and I am tired of the police being the bad guys when they have to make a life and death decision when someone points a gun at them. I don’t care wether it is real or fake if someone makes that type of an agressive action the police have to do what they have to do. Just like our profession their number one job is going home to their families in the morning!
I hear you, Mario, but I wonder what connection your point has to this particular post. I am a supporter of police officers – my nephew is one – and the idea that some criminal might be using a fake-looking REAL gun like this is very disturbing to me. THAT was my point here.