Soaker Gun: Clean Fun or Dangerous Toy? : Toys: Debate surrounds popular super-squirter and whether it encourages violence. Orange County expert says its ‘the real shooting’ people should be concerned about.

“ . . . Ridiculous. It’s just a big squirt gun.”

--Mission Viejo mom

“I think (they’re) disgusting.”

--Eagle Rock mom

“I wouldn’t get excited about it.”

--Irvine child psychiatrist

Are they dangerous?

Or are they occasionally misused but innately harmless toys?

* In Boston last month, a mega-squirt gun battle escalated into real gunfire, killing a 15-year-old.

* In Harlem, an enraged gunman wounded a 16-year-old boy and 29-year-old man after being soaked by the plastic air-pressurized pistols.

* Last Thursday, a school bus driver in Inglewood was shot in the eyes with ammonia.

The debate over the super-selling Super Soaker, the high-powered squirt gun, is consuming growing numbers of psychologists, safety experts, toy manufacturers, politicians, parents--and kids.

The squirt guns, which can spray up to 50 feet, are simply good clean fun, one camp insists. Real guns are the problem.

Others counter: Any kind of weapon encourages violent behavior. One psychologist goes so far as to say kids should be given punching bags instead.

But there’s one thing everyone agrees on: Children, especially boys, are fascinated with guns--and they love the giant neon water shooters. In little more than two years, the Super Soaker, along with copycats “Saturator” and “Liquidator,” have sold millions. Stores can’t keep them on the shelves.

“It’s not a new item--it’s been out for three years--but it’s selling very, very well,” said a Toys R Us manager in Orange County. But because of the controversy, “we’ve got a note from the company telling us to give no comment about them. So, no comment.”

Most parents have to decide at some point whether they will allow guns in their households.

“All this about them being dangerous, it’s ridiculous,” said a Mission Viejo woman, whose 7- and 5 1/2-year-old sons each own one. “It’s just a big squirt gun. If it’s going to mold their attitudes, it’ll probably turn them into firemen.”

“I see water guns as different than gun-guns,” says Van Nuys father Terry Baumsten, whose 4 1/2-year-old son Matthew has what he calls an “arsenal” of weapons. Although Baumsten and his wife, Josette, are not thrilled with their son’s interest in guns, the Super Soaker does not disturb them.

“When he’s playing with a Super Soaker, he’s trying to get you wet, and it’s not so much a gun game,” he says. “With toy guns he’s wrapped up with ‘kill, die.’ But with a water gun, he doesn’t take on a warlike, combat sort of attitude.”

Other parents don’t see the difference between a squirt gun and any other type of play gun.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate for a 3-year-old to have a gun. I think it’s disgusting,” says Eagle Rock mother Kathy Hirsh, whose son, Sterling, is 3. “Guns are violent, and we don’t want our children playing with them.”

“I will not buy one of those (Super Soakers),” says Altadena mother Alice Sterling, whose son, Forrest, is 5. “I think they are very commercial, and there is no need to blast one another with squirt guns. I think of the behavior patterns it is creating, and they also look dangerous.”

Experts on children also are divided.

“I wouldn’t get excited about it. I don’t know of any kids who have been harmed by it,” says Dr. Justin D. Call, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at the UC Irvine School of Medicine.

“There is a subtle psychological depth to it, but it doesn’t have to do with squirt guns. It has to do with the tendency in our society to try protecting the next generation instead of doing something with the grown-ups. The grown-ups are the ones having all the problems with aggression. It’s silly in regards to children.

“We ought to do something about the real shooting. I think the kids would be much more impressed by that than by being forbidden squirt guns.”

But Van Nuys psychologist Sondra Goldstein sees a difference in the new guns. “Ten years ago, squirt guns were small and playful-looking. Now they are big and threatening-looking and emit water with a stronger force than a traditional squirt gun.

“You can’t blame violence in society on something like that, but that kind of gun can be used in a hostile way and can easily be transformed into an instrument of violence.”

Goldstein says teen-agers “have more concepts” about how a Super Soaker might be a weapon of destruction. “A 5-year-old wouldn’t think of filling it with bleach. . . . (But) I question whether a toy like that is necessary or appropriate.”

Carollee Howes, a professor of education at UCLA, says that although experts have not determined whether playing with toy guns does, indeed, create violent behavior patterns, there is probably no difference between a squirt gun and any other toy gun. “One squirts water, one doesn’t,” says Howes, who specializes in social development and child care.

But if a child comes from an unstable home environment, says Los Angeles clinical psychologist Edna Herrmann, he might grow up thinking guns are an acceptable way of protecting himself.

“If it’s condoned as a toy, there is an assumption that they are a legitimate way of attacking people or elements in society that threaten you,” she says.

Mimi Bakon of Pasadena says her sons, Kevin, 5, and Michael, 8, love guns. Bakon, whose husband is a police officer, believes people have misused the Super Soakers and ruined the toy for others. She has no problem with her children having guns.

“They know all the gun safety rules,” Bakon says. “They have a great respect for them because of being around them.”

Goldstein says part of children’s fascination with guns stems from the barrage of images they see on television and in the movies, which portray people using guns to settle their problems.

Boys are especially interested in guns, she says, largely because most of the people with guns are men.

But boys also tend to be genetically more aggressive then females, psychologists say, and boys are also encouraged to hide their fear and weakness. Guns make them feel more powerful and protected.

“I feel strong and protected when I have a gun,” says Mimi Bakon’s son, Michael. “I feel powerful because real guns are powerful. Even when I’m pretending, I feel strong.”

Despite a child’s yearning for a gun, Goldstein says a punching bag is preferable.

“Right now, in today’s time, with so much killing and aggression perpetrated with guns, it is better not to give them guns at all.”

In response to the violence associated with the Super Soakers, lawmakers in New Jersey and Michigan have proposed banning the toys, which come in five sizes, the largest of which holds up to two liters of water. And Boston Mayor Raymond L. Flynn asked stores to stop selling the florescent weapons. Twelve major stores complied.

“If something is going to lead to violence, than that is a problem,” says Arthur Jones, Flynn’s press secretary. It’s not the simple idea of squirting water. There are (squirt) toys on the market that are terrific. The Super Soaker has lead to violence and death.”

But executives at Laramie Corp., the Philadelphia-based Super Soaker manufacturer, are firm in their defense of the toy. They balk at all the commotion.

“It’s ridiculous,” says Al Davis, executive vice president of Laramie. “It’s a fun toy. People who say it should be pulled have been laughed out of it.”

Still, some toy store buyers don’t all feel comfortable selling the toy.

F. M. Woolworth Co. and Bradlees in Boston are the only stores that have officially pulled the guns, which range in price from $5 to $50. But F. A. O. Schwarz, which has 26 stores nationwide and one in Los Angeles, is also considering taking them off the shelves.

A spokeswoman for the Toy Manufacturers of America says, however, that the industry is frustrated by the Super Soaker ordeal, adding that the responsibility of toy manufacturers is to make safe toys. The bright, bulky Super Soaker and its look-alikes could never be mistaken for real guns, she says.

“If you have a destructive, evil person, it will take more to make him angry than a squirt gun,” says Jodi Levin, communications director for the Toy Manufacturers of America. “It’s not a toy industry problem, it’s a society problem. What’s the next step, taking baseball bats off the market, scissors, cooking utensils? Politicians are avoiding responsibility by focusing on toys.”

Gene Erbin, an aid to Assemblyman Lloyd Connelly (D-Sacramento), who has helped draft a number of gun control laws, agrees. “Politicians should spend as much time outlawing real guns as they do squirt guns,” he says. “If they were the only guns in society, we’d all be wet but alive.”