In 1986, Entertech’s line of battery powered water guns took gun play to new heights. The brand’s M-16, AK Centerfire, and Water Hawk modeled the Colt M16A2, Hecker & Koch MP-5 and Intratec Tec-9, effectively giving kids what they wanted most from their toys—realistic fakes that could bring the most innocent gun games to life. Each featured a 30ft spray range (a first for water guns at the time) and motorized sounds that made stimulating the noise of a shot obsolete. But the toys’ real appeal rested in their black matte-finished plastic and detachable magazines, which made them virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
All this while growing gang violence, hijackings and highly publicized incidents of kids shot for wielding fakes stoked fears and fueled a chorus of critics who claimed the toys were a nuisance and needed to be dealt with. In San Francisco, police killed a 13-year-old mentally handicapped boy after mistaking his toy for the real thing. In Memphis, a boy was shot and killed with a fake .45-caliber handgun. And in New York City, six people were shot, two killed and more than 1,400 toy guns confiscated in criminal incidents.
America was at a crossroads. Kids wanted real-looking fakes to fuel their gun play. Manufactures and retailers wanted a piece of the nearly $65 million toy gun market. Parents, gun control advcoates and law enforcement wanted to save innocent lives.
Something had to give, and it did in August of 1987 when a man armed with a gun, stunned television viewers when he ordered KNBC’s David Horowitz to read a statement during a live news broadcast. Fortunately for Horowitz, the gun was a fake. For children around the country, the incident marked the end of an era. Toys “R” Us, the nation’s largest toy retailer at the time, pulled its realistic fakes from stores’ shelves after the incident, hoping to thwart the negative press these toys were garnering. Lawmakers suit in November of 1988 when Congress passed US Code Title 15 Sec. 5001 on the idea that a color could cure this epedemic.
Chosen for its abilty to set objects apart from their surroundings, Federal Standard Color No. 12199 (or “Blaze Orange” as it’s more commonly known) was long a symbol for safety. Used for a variety of items, including traffic cones, life jackets, high-visibilty hunting gear and prison inmate uniforms, lawmakers believed its application to the non-removable stripes and muzzles of imitation firearms would make it easy for mugging victims and police officers to distinguish toys from the real thing. Unfortunately, kids across the country concluded otherwise. Realisitc fakes gave them a sense of power that they were not willing to foraske. So they peeled, pryed and colored over the mandate with paint and permanent inks, ultimately higlihting the limit of the laws efforts. Twenty-two years later, look-alikes are still used in muggings, and police still shoot kids for wielding fakes that look real.
Fast forward to today, where the world wide web has become a how-to guide on pimping your pistol. On video sharing sites and in forums around the Web, gun enthusiasts offer tutorials, tips and best practices on everything from mounting a scope to fashioning your gun into a corrosion-free colored delight. In which case, Duracoat, a popular firearm finish manufactured and sold online by Laurer Custom Weaponry is the hands down favorite. Known among gun enthusiasts for its wide ranging collection of colors and camouflage patterns, Duracoat has inspired today’s more sophisticated crop of pistol painters to master a new craft—painting their real guns to look like toys, once again blurring the line between real and fake and raising the question if mandating toy guns is a good idea gone bad.
In New York City, candy-colored 9mms’ come with a message. On laminated posters and placards throughout the city’s 468 subway stations, and on its more than 2,100 subway cars, and 5,400 buses, two handguns—one black, and one red—rest on their side. Underneath, a question asks passengers to decide: “Which one is real? Not the one you think.” The message, a rhetorical “shot in the head” is the tagline for New York’s latest public awareness campaign, aimed at educating the public on the dangers posed by real guns that look like toys.
The city’s various daily’s tell the stories of the "caps pealed" and “quick come-ups” that have made regulating toy guns a priority in the city since 1955. "He was "acting like Rambo," crouching in a shooting stance, a Housing Authority worker said in the Daily News about George D’Amato Jr, the lastest victim shot in March for wielding a toy gun that officers thought was real. "Stop playing, police will think it's real,” a police source told the Post of the worker's warning moments before the shooting. By the time news cameras arrived, only a silver-colored, plastic pistol with the words "Zebra II" inscribed on the barrel lay on the ground. D’Amato Jr. was pronounced dead nearly an hour later. Days later, the story itself was dead, scratched from the pages like a defaced serial number…
Thus far, best efforts have largely focused on stores that sell illegal replicas. In conjuction with the public awarenss campaign, city officials proposed new lesgislation that would increases fines on stores by 500% to $5000, up from $1000 for each realistic fake found on a store’s shelves. But even with these measures in place, stores continue to sale the neon colored pistols that have replaced the real looking fakes of the past, leaving the door open for indivuals looking to outsmart authorities by painting their real weapons to look like toys.
“People will do a lot of twisted things to make a buck," New York's Mayor, Michael Bloomberg told reporters at a 2006 press conference where he proposed the ban of Duracoat . “What possible reason can you give to want to paint a gun so it looks like a child's toy. [This]…sets a new low and we are going to stop it.” But rather than stop the firearm finish, the mayor’s efforts only propeled its popularity. This year is Duracoat’s 10 year anniversary and in the first quarter of 2010 revenues were up 25 percent from the year before.
Laurer’s Founder and CEO, Steve Laurer gives much of the credit to the publicity Bloomberg’s ban has garnered, highlighting a unique love/hate relationship that has spawned. "It’s marketing for him,” Laurer said of Bloomberg. “That’s what he does. I didn’t even know the guys name until this whole thing popped up three years ago.”Soon after, Laurer was spinning the ban into his own publicity. In 2008, Laurer released “The Bloomberg Collection,” a special-edition coloring kit made to mock the mayor. In the kit are individuals colors for each of the city’s five burroughs, along with brick wall paint and graffiti decorations. For only $129 gun enthusiasts can replicate the concrete jungle right on their AK. “Everyday he’s doing something to bring attention to himself, Laurer said in response to city’s public awareness campaign, which he only recently became aware of when an unidentified MTA worker sent a poster to the company offices. “Duracoat is just something that he [Bloomberg] used for a while amongst many other things that he’s used.”
Whether the posters are a genuine attempt to increase awareness or just a publicity ploy for city officials, the question remains: how much can a poster solve. And have officials even considered the posters' possible negative effect, introducing criminals to a tactic they might have not considered before the posters appeared? Unlike the 1980’s when ten-year-olds stole spray paint to dress their toys, today’s adolescents buy easily accessible real guns in their neighborhoods. Politics may once again be diverting valuable resoures, sidetracking real solutions, and welcoming criminal types to exploit the next legislative loophole. And still, real guns continue to take real lives.
