Angelina Jolie and son Pax (courtesy http://fox411.blogs.foxnews.com)

Following the shooting of Tamir Rice (who was holding a toy gun that looked real at the time), there has been a push by the usual suspects to ban toy guns. Instead of teaching kids that walking around outside with something that looks like a deadly weapon is a bad idea, the Attorney General of New York has decided that the way to “fix” this “problem” is to try and crack down on the sale of these inanimate objects. Because that’s been so successful in the past. Now it appears that the toy companies have agreed to Herr Schneiderman’s demands . . .

From CBS:

Retailers including Walmart, Sears and Amazon have agreed to halt the sales of life-like toy guns in New York.

State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said Monday that the retailers also have agreed to pay over $300,000 in penalties.

[…]

Schneiderman said there have been 63 shootings in New York since 1994 as a result of someone holding a toy weapon.

It is interesting to note that 63 shootings since 1994 works out to about 3 incidents a year. If the people of New York wanted to crack down on a deadly object being sold in these stores perhaps they could have better spent their energy regulating bicycles. FYI, bike accidents kill ~800 people a year. A little more than three killed as a result of confusion over a toy gun.

According to the local gun control chapter, this should be just the beginning. However, as usual their rallying cry for more gun control is about as factually accurate as any magazine picture of Kim Kardashian.

Leah Gunn Barrett with the group New Yorkers Against Gun Violence said now it’s time for more rules regarding the real thing.

“Teddy bears and toy guns have more regulations than real guns,” she said.

Right. Because I totally remember getting a background check the last time I went to buy a teddy bear.

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67 COMMENTS

  1. If the NY state gov’t keeps this up, pretty soon they will eliminate death altogether in NY, right?

  2. And downunder the Greens party has proposed banning toy guns because they have been used in about a dozen armed robberies a year over the last five years.

    They are clearly confusing toy guns with replica guns, which are banned under the state firearms acts. So no Airsoft in Australia.

  3. Thought police much?

    What about all those toy guns in current circulation? What about the fact that I can cerakote my rifle in bright and flashy colors just like how I can take a black rattle can and Tacticool my super soaker.

    Liberal logic: would be cringe worthy if I didn’t see it so often.

  4. This is terrible news for cops. Now, when the cops shoot an innocent kid — which they will — they can’t point to the airsoft gun lying on the sidewalk next to the 12 year old’s perforated body and say, “y’see, I thought he was armed.”

    • Law Enforcement won’t lose “thought it was a real gun” Police will just have to pack a throw down toy gun. Something they will pick up on five finger discount at next no knock raid or own kid’s toy box

      • How about they pack a small can of black spray paint, and just shoot a little on the end of the barrel, so they could say “It looked real”

  5. I remember the year I couldn’t get a teddy bear for my kid for Christmas. I waited to long and couldn’t get through the background check in time. My wife saved the day by going to a toy show and used the stuffed toy loop hole and got the teddy bear.

  6. It’s not about accidental shootings, much as banning pop-tart guns has nothing whatsoever to do with safety. It’s about brain washing future generations. As one active gun blogger says: Again. Still.

      • @Mr. Franklin
        “It’s about brain washing future generations”

        That is what happens when liberty is sacrificed for material comforts. Americans allow this to happen to our children, and WE have no problem being socially engineered and conditioned like one of Pavlov’s dogs.

  7. A little quibble with your stats.
    If you compare 3 shootings a year in NY (city or state???) with 800 bicycle deaths per year nationwide, it’s a pretty pointless comparison.

    • For not knowing ahead of time someone would demand they not have been selling toy guns. It goes along with the whole pre-crime thing.

      I thin FWW just below nailed it – nothing more than a good old fashioned shakedown. Makes me wonder why any company stays in NY, actually. Or Chicago for that matter.

    • Apparently, for breaking an ex post facto whim. It’s not a law, see, just the whim of some bureaucrat, so it’s okay.

  9. Well my Mattel 38special from over 50 years ago would get me killed today. But not the Tommy gun that came with it(I hope). And a 300000buck penalty? Way to shake ’em down. BTW I just saw Amy Schumer hangin’ with her cousin the gubner chuck hatin’ on guns. I had to suppress an urge to hurl…

    • Yup, Chuck Schumer and Amy Schumer are cousins, proving that insanity really does run in families.

      • Recessive gene Ralph? I was already disgusted by the fat chick before I gleaned that info’…

  10. Pretty much every boy had toy guns 50 years ago. How come the police never had this problem back then?

      • Had somebody tell me he used to shoot cops with cap guns in the 1950s and the cops shot back with finger guns.

        Now simple possession (hand carry) is used as an excuse for homicide.

        • Yep. bang bang followed by big smiles. If we didn’t want to be cowboys we wanted to be cops (or maybe firemen) back then. Cops were looked up to and the respect generally went both ways.
          We also had rifle club in grade school, I kept my Wards .22 in my locker, then walked to and from school with it. Some kids carried them on the bus. Nobody blinked an eye.
          We really have become a nation of wimps*.

          (*there’s a better word that I’m not going to use)

    • I had an M16, much like the kid in the picture. I also had an Uzi and a 1911 from a Rambo play set. My friends and I ran all over the neighborhood with those guns. We even had cops drive by us and barely give us a glance. Of course this was in the 1980s. Things started changing in the late 90s’.

  12. Just saw this on the Buffalo news, and went to TTAG to get to the truth of the matter. Of course they failed to mention that the 63 deaths were since 1994….

    Clearly there is a lack of parental guidance going on.

    • They also failed to mention that the 63 people were mostly innocent bystanders, accidentally shot by NYPD, when they missed the intended target due poor training and the ridiculous trigger pull on department Glocks.

  13. Wouldn’t it have been easier to, you know, train police:
    – Getting home to your family is actually not the highest priority. If it is, you should change professions.
    – Not everyone with a gun – fake or real – is a criminal (yes, even in New York).
    – Not every potential threat needs to be dealt with using deadly force.

    Oh wait. That’s right. New York.

    Also. Police. We can’t even train most of them to know the law, while they’re spouting off about ignorance of the law is no excuse.

  14. What is not clear to me is whether the 63 “toy gun related” shootings include “Sumdude who wants to make a withdrawal from his local mini-mart” and just “happens” to be holding an airsoft pistol or just kids mistakenly believed to have guns while playing.

  15. I would like to point out an issue with the “63 shootings in New York since 1994 as a result of someone holding a toy weapon.” statement. Did you notice that they didn’t say those 63 “someones” were children? Toy guns are very popular in “suicide by cop” attempts and, especially in a place like NYC where you are less likely to come across legally armed people, in armed robberies. 63 is a very small number to start with, but we have no idea how many of those 63 were people who, for one reason or another, were purposely trying to convince people that their toy gun was real.

  21. “Teddy bears and toy guns have more regulations than real guns,” she said. Do I have to fill out form 4473 and get a background check to buy Teddy Ruxpin?

  22. Yeah, it’s NY for ya. Knee Jerk pronounced slightly wrong could be abbreviated NY.

    Another reason not to live there.

  23. “Schneiderman said there have been 63 shootings in New York since 1994 as a result of someone holding a toy weapon.”

    More bogus numbers!
    Criminals love using airsoft and replica guns when they have trouble getting hold of the real thing. How many of those 63 were criminals who got shot in the commission of a crime? I’d guess most.

  24. Toy guns and anything that reminds us of the civil war, or hunting lions, or freedom. Can’t you see?

  25. Perhaps teaching “law enforcement officers” not to be trigger happy buttholes would be more effective. In the Rice case eliminating officer immunity would be more than justified.

  26. In this Land Of The Brie and Home Of The Knave, commercial enterprises have a right to sell or not sell whatever they like. And we TPOG have the right to not shop at these businesses…..until the Supreme Court declares that refusing to engage in an economic transaction with any business constitutes an impermissible disruption of commerce. At that point, we will be compelled to spend money at whichever offended/oppressed business wins the legal battle.

  27. amazon is going down the tubes fast, and wallyworld is following them. Did toyrus cave? Family dollar? Feel bad for th emid to upstate NY’ers, albany and the city loons have them locked out of everything

  29. When toy guns are banned, only ….oh fer chrissake really NY?
    Soon enough you will be voting for President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho while watching re-runs of Ow My Balls.

  31. I assume NY is the most safe and least crime laden area in the Country now? Progressives taking over. 63 since 1994? And what if we looked at each of those cases, what might we learn? I will never go to NY, why take the risk.

  33. “Instead of teaching kids that walking around outside with something that looks like a deadly weapon is a bad idea,…”
    Excuse me? Since when did this become a bad idea? Since when has being a kid become so deadly? What in our society has broken so badly that kids can’t play cops and robbers with toy guns anymore? I grew up in NY, just outside the Brooklyn line. My Lone Ranger silver colts were about as realistic as it gets from more than 10 feet away. I shot at the cops all the time and some even played dead. Why are cops shooting kids is the real question. And how do we stop that?

  34. So, what’s the fine for??

    They should fight it in court; they have deeper pockets for lawyers than NY does.

  35. In an unrelated story, sales of tampons have skyrocketed in NY state and have begun to drive up the price in CA.

  36. People, you are missing the point of this.

    It’s not about safety. It’s not about toys. It’s not even about any sort of immediate effect.

    This is about giving one more little nudge in the minds of today’s kids that guns are bad and people need to be protected from them. This is what I’ve posted about here and elsewhere for a very long time as the Progressive long game. Just the word itself, “progressive,” tells you that they are working on one small step at a time or decades or even generations. Think of the Fabians in the U.K. They know they have lost the gun battle in the current generation, but know that sometimes you need to lose a battle or two in order to win the war. That’s the reason their control of the education system is so important.

  37. I was a kid growing up in the 90’s and I wore a toy single action everywhere except school because I was taught that guns and toy guns didn’t go to school. It could be the park, grocery store, neighborhood playground, out for a walk, my grandparents, anywhere in public basically, I wore that toy single action everywhere! In all instances, it was in a holster that looked real and it was black with a brown faux wood grip; it would have looked like a real gun at a distance. I cannot remember once anyone complaining to me or admonishing me or doing the same to my mother and this was a practice that continued from at least the ages of 6-8.

    But I guess the 90’s were so drastically different that no cop would have suspected that lil old 8 year old me was a hardened criminal waiting to cap him…

  38. I hate to be the pedantic one here, but we need to do our best to make sure we’re putting out apples when making a comparison to apples.

    If we’re going to use the statement “63 shootings in New York since 1994 as a result of someone holding a toy weapon”, then that needs to be compared with the bike statistic in just NY, not the entire US.

    Still, the briefest search turned up stats for the years 1996 – 2005, where 225 people were killed in bicycle accidents. That’s not the same time period, but a shorter one, but still averages to 25 deaths per year, more than an 8-fold increase over the shooting statistic. Of course, covering the same entire time period will only increase that difference.

    Where’s the outrage?

  39. I have been on this earth 73 years. When I was a young boy, all boys and some girls had toy guns. We played cowboys and indians. This was not localized. It was all over the United States. Rich or poor. Did not matter. We were not considered a threat to anyone.

    Kids today are missing something very important, PARENTING.

  40. Monday’s agreement between Amazon, Kmart, Sears, Walmart and other smaller retailers acknowledged that the retailers violated the Empire State’s laws against selling “imitation weapons,” or weapons that look realistic. It’s an absolutely unnecessary risk, because toy guns, as New York law requires, can be easily distinguishable.

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