Kids With Toy Guns May Be Playing With Fire

In April, a few days after the United States attacked Libya, 14-year-old Manuel Rodriguez took his fully automatic “Water Warrior” toy rifle to the top of a downtown Los Angeles building.

A worker across the street called police, saying a man with a gun was shooting at cars on the Harbor Freeway. Several officers arrived at the scene, cordoned off the area and gave chase.

“They told me to throw down the gun and put my hands on my head,” Rodriguez recalled. Police quickly noted Rodriguez’s youthful appearance and recognized that the gun was a $30 plastic replica of a real weapon.

“It could have been a very tragic situation, especially after tensions in the Middle East,” said Los Angeles Police Department Sgt. Larry Ariaz.

Rodriguez said he was only playing. He may as well as have been playing with fire.

One-to-One Scale Copies

Many of the nation’s 75 toy gun manufacturers are producing one-to-one scale copies of real guns.

They are presumably designed for innocent play, and toy manufacturers contacted by UPI uniformly said they are not trying to aim for an adult market to bolster sagging sales of the last few years. There is a growing sophistication in design, performance--and expense--of these “toys” in recent years, however, and police across the nation are gravely concerned.

“A lot of the guns look so real now. And in the dark, you can’t tell the difference,” said Perry Johnson, a police officer in Highland Park, Mich.

“Believe me, if one was pointed at you or a police officer, something very bad could happen,” Los Angeles Police Department Lt. L. A. Durrer said.

Such ominous-sounding playthings as the “Rambo M-16,” the “Uzi Water Pistol,” the “AK Centerfire Submachine Gun” and the “MX-7” rifle can be found in the aisles of the nation’s 235 Toys ‘R’ Us outlets, major department stores and corner groceries.

Toy guns are nothing new, and few things seem more harmless than the image of a little boy playing with his toy pistol.

But on March 3, 1983, Stanton Police Officer Anthony Sperl didn’t know it was a toy when he shot and killed a 5-year-old boy clutching a T. J. Hooker plastic revolver that his mother had bought for him two days earlier.

The City of Stanton agreed last month to pay the mother, 31-year-old Patricia Ridge, $395,000 for the accidental killing. Sperl quietly entered a sanitarium after the incident and now lives on an $800-a-month disability pension in Los Angeles. His former attorney said he remains “depressed.”

A similar instance occurred in the wee hours of June 4, 1986, when Diane Cook, a mother of five, was shot and killed on the doorstep of her home in Washington, D.C., after she pointed a cap pistol at a stranger.

Her 12-year-old son, Nathan, said the armed man, apparently looking for someone else, began knocking on her door around 1 a.m. “When he knocked the third time, she went and got a cap pistol and went to the door,” Nathan told police.

“That man, he was out there hollering. My mother opened the door and pointed the toy gun at him, and he shot her.”

Little of the mischief triggered by toy guns ends in tragedy, but there have been a number of close calls--some of them laughable, at least on first look:

- At Boston University last April, a student carrying an Uzi-style water gun walked into the Student Union building while a trustees’ meeting was in progress. Campus police responded, not knowing the gun was fake.

- Virginia Beach, Va., police say they are worried about the growing number of high-tech squirt guns showing up at the beach. At least three people have been arrested for disturbing the peace in recent weeks after water battles sparked minor riots. In one case, officers drew their guns in response to a prankster who was brandishing a plastic toy gun that looked frighteningly genuine.

‘The Beach at Beirut’

“It’s beginning to look like the beach at Beirut,” said one startled sunbather in Bethany Beach, Del., gazing at a black plastic “submachine gun” squirter hanging by its strap from a sand chair.

- Charleston, W. Va., Police Chief Kent Carper said three police cars responded in May to a complaint that some young men were driving around in a car pointing a gun at pedestrians. Police found the culprits and pulled them over.

“It turned out they had one of the battery-powered squirt guns,” Carper said. “It was very realistic-looking. They were given a stern talking to and agreed it was a foolish thing to do.”

“It’s a deadly combination,” said San Jose Police Chief Joe McNamara. “You just can’t assume because it’s a young child that he’s not using a real gun. Children kill too.”

San Diego Police Chief William Kollender said, “I think the last thing we want to do is to teach our children that a handgun is fun, and that it’s OK to mimic the violence we see on TV or in the movies.”

Toy guns as we know them today date to at least the early 17th Century, when children in Europe crafted tiny firearms from wood, a spokesman at the Toy Manufacturers Assn. in New York said.

Bernard Mergen, a professor of American civilization studies at Georgetown University and a toy historian, said the air pistol was first displayed in the popular Youth Companion periodical in the 1870s.

“These guns looked quite realistic even then,” Mergen said.

The more modern toy guns are for sale in trendy, upscale and adult catalogues like the San Francisco-based Sharper Image, which depicted in its most recent edition a wholesome young couple shooting streams of water at each other with what resembles a submachine gun.

It’s the $29 Beretta Water Gun with a built-in pump that spews a gush of water up to 25 feet. “Realistic sound effects show you mean business,” it says in the catalogue. “If your first clip runs dry, don’t surrender. Just clip in your reserve tank, and you’re back in business.”

Andy Gatto, vice president of Entertech in New York, said his toy company, which makes the Uzi-type water pistols, is in the process of putting bright spray paint on the tips of its guns “so there is no confusion.”

‘Realism Is In’

But “realism is in,” said Steven Kort, vice president of marketing at Imperial Toy Corp. in Hawthorne, Calif., a firm that last February introduced its line of the “The Real Stuff Dart Guns,” a near replica of the 9-millimeter Baretta pistol.

“We offer real slide action where the top of the gun is cocked back to load the dart into the chamber,” Kort said, quickly adding that Imperial also has begun to place a colored insert in the nose of the hard black plastic dart gun “so people will know it’s only a toy.”

Renowned Stanford University sociologist Seymour Lipset attributed the interest in duplications of real-life weaponry to “a sort of macho Rambo craze. People want to identify with being tough and macho and that they can go after (Libyan leader Col. Moammar) Kadafi themselves.”

Although police voice consternation about replica toy guns, there are few cries for regulation.

No Letters of Complaint

Consumer Product Safety Commission spokesman Lou Brott said he could not recall seeing any letters of complaint on the subject.

“People just want things to be realistic,” Kort said. “We don’t create the trend in the market. We just react. And we know that right now, the more realistic the better.”

Realism paid a visit to to Love Field in Dallas recently. A salesman with a toy gun in his briefcase passed through the security gate at Southwest Airlines, setting off a scare that delayed 15 flights and forced hundreds of travelers to go through a second security check.

“The luggage passed through and the passenger, one those typical running-late businessmen, grabbed it and then mixed in with other passengers,” said Gary Barron, executive vice president of Southwest.