Armed with Reason: The Podcast - Episode 10
Armed with Reason: The Podcast - Episode 10
This week, Devin and Caitlin are joined by Armed With Reason editor Eric Davidson to talk about the history of toy gun TV ads.
For our latest podcast, GVPedia founder and President Devin Hughes and Executive Director Caitlin Clarkson Pereira welcome Armed With Reason editor Eric Davidson to discuss his recent feature about the history of toy gun TV advertisements and their corollary to the marketing of real guns.
You can listen to the chat via our channel on Spotify as well as watch on YouTube, or read the transcription below.
We hope you’ll tune in and let us know not only what you think, but what you’d like to hear more about in the future. And if you are interested in recommending a guest, or even being one yourself, please let us know!
Given the abundance of gun violence in our country, it is critical to have the ability to discuss and advocate for a safer community. This podcast is one more way for the movement to do just that.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION:
Caitlin: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us here on the Armed With Reason podcast, brought to you by GVPedia. If you've been here before, you've heard us introduce ourselves 100 times, but we're going to do it again anyway. I'm Caitlin, the Executive Director of GVPedia, and Devin, who is our founder, is here with us today.
Devin: It's me again.
Caitlin: It's Devin again. Yes.
Caitlin: So last month, the editor of our Armed With Reason Substack, whose name is Eric, wrote a piece about the evolution of toy guns, which was interesting for a variety of reasons, but especially given the holiday season and toys, we thought that it was particularly time appropriate, and it actually ended up being one of our most viewed articles of 2023. So we wanted to bring Eric on the podcast this week to give us some insight into what he learned while he was researching the piece. So welcome, Eric. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Eric: Hello. Thanks for having me. I should clarify, it was about technically it was about, uh, the advertising of toy guns over the years and how I felt like it changed. But we'll get into that.
Caitlin: Yes, yes. Thank you for clarifying that. Yeah.
Eric: And I'm no expert on toy guns.
Caitlin: So, Eric, tell us what inspired you to research and write about the history of toy guns and the advertisements that attempted to sell them?
Eric: So around Christmas, I think Shannon and I, um, my girlfriend — who also works for GVPedia — we were just talking about catalogs and how fun it was always to get like when we were kids, and you still got paper catalogs in the mail. They came around every, you know, October or whatever. And it was always fun to get them to circle what toys you wanted and, and how nobody has catalogs sent to them anymore. You know, something in one of these conversations and then it just got me thinking about picking out toys and, you know, circling things in a catalog, ostensibly to give to my mom, who, I guess Santa shops at Sears. I don't know how that worked or how I figured that out when I was a kid. And I remember thinking back that I never really played with toy guns much, and, um, but, you know, they were around, all my friends have them. And I kind of got me wondering why they were never, like, a big deal for me. Um, and then I just thought, as we're always looking for good original content here at Armed With Reason, um, I thought, oh, Christmas is coming and we should maybe do something like that. And I know people like, like, shopping tips and things, and I just thought it was our version of a of a kind of a story like that. So I just got thinking about it. And, uh, I also really I tend to like old stuff, you know, old TV shows, old movies. And it's fun to jump down rabbit holes on YouTube of old TV commercials. So I thought, in a very nonacademic way, just to look at the way that toy guns have been marketed via kids television toy commercials through the years. And I really completely unscientificly, uh, zoomed through YouTube for a few days and just picked out what I thought were representative commercials that sort of told a bit of a story. And, um, that's how I did it.
Devin: Cool. Um, so while you're doing this research, like, what did you see as the biggest link between various types of toy guns being seen as in at the time, and then also any toy guns being seen as inappropriate?
Eric: Yeah. So, um, just to, and this is probably more from the previous question, but I know as a kid I always loved squirt guns. I thought they were hilarious. I think anybody, you know, you see, you can squirt water in someone's face. It's funny. So I always like that as a kid. Um, and I remembered, um. Well, anyway, to get to to get to your question and get back to that, how I, um, I feel like I developed this aversion towards toy guns. But to answer your question, um, basically, I noticed that post-war, when most of these commercials would have started, you know, television commercials for toy guns, pretty much post-war. There was a little bit of military because we were coming out of the war. So there's a lot of G.I. Joe Joe toys and stuff, but those are more action figures and things, um, and maybe like toy jeeps and stuff. Um, but the toy guns really came in with the, it seemed like, with the really huge popularity for a long time of, uh, Westerns in movies and on TV. A lot of people forget that Gunsmoke, I think up until The Simpsons, was maybe the longest running television show on TV. But, um, none of these shows are ever on, hardly even in syndication, even when I was a kid anymore. But those toys seem to mimic the big popularity of, of, you know, westerns. Um, and you know that you, you only see a little bit of the I did notice I only saw a little bit of the cowboys and Indians, as it were. You know, some of those commercials didn't really show a lot of shooting at bad guy Indians, you know, which is a whole other topic we could talk about another time as well. Absolutely. And everything else. Um, I was a little surprised there wasn't too much of that. That said, this is YouTube. There are only so many commercials that got saved over the years and were, you know, uh, uploaded to YouTube. So who knows. There're probably thousands more commercials in the ether somewhere. So I noticed that popularity of cowboy stuff. And then you can tell like it literally goes along with like, oh, and then like gangster movies by like the latter 50s and early 60s and shoot em ups like Al Capone or whatever. So you start seeing little toy commercials with guys with fedoras and black coats and like, film noir or something, you know. Doubt they called it film noir in a toy commercial in 1960. But in any of it, um, and then you see like, oh, okay, then you're getting into the 60s and it's like, oh, spy movies, James Bond. You see these kind of now the kids have silencers on their guns and stuff like that. So they're that I kind of saw that it seemed like, and even all the way up to say, the Star Wars toys, which again, were mostly action figures and stuff, but they had Han Solo's, um, laser gun, you know, which they called, we were talking about this last night. They didn't call them guns exactly. They called them something else, you know.
Devin: Blasters.
Eric: Blasters. Thank you. Blasters. And which, I wonder about that too. I wonder if that was part of the marketing. Right. But in any event, um, uh, besides being in the movie. So you saw they were all based on sort of fictional Hollywood, or just sort of fun kid trends. And then it seems like when you get into these sort of early ‘70s and this is where, you know, I was born in ‘67. So I see, my memories are my mom being a little skeptical of toy guns and like Westerns weren't as popular anymore. And and I think on a parental level the movies started getting more violent, more realistically violent. And it was taken more seriously. When people were shot in movies, you saw the bleeding, you saw the holes, you know, you know, Bonnie and Clyde, all that and The Godfather movies. And then the whole just hippie movement stuff of the late ‘60s that were like, guns are bad, killing people is bad. You know, um, Western heroes aren't always good, you know, and that stuff started passing. And so by the time I was a little kid asking for guns, if I did, um, my... anyway to to finish the story. So then I noticed after the Star Wars era, when toys were kind of back in for a second, toy guns because of this kind of science fiction movie trend, then, by the time you got into the Reagan years, the toy commercials became more militaristic again, and they weren't necessarily tied to a trend of the time -- well besides Reagan and I guess the Cold War, the end of the Cold War. Um, they weren't as tied to, like, James Bond or cowboys. They were just like military. And the toys became a little more, uh, technical and a little more sort of, uh, complex, you know? Um, and then by the time you get to the really popular Super Soakers, like the giant water guns that, you know, you have to, you know, um, pump and all that, those commercials are almost exclusively like kids running around and, like, hiding behind trees and and, like, making notes with each other about where to attack and all that. It's completely divorced from any, any sort of movie or TV show. And it's just about — again, unscientific — but it's just about this sort of tactical, you know, shooting. And I thought that was actually kind of how the NRA's promotion had gone over the years, when you think about it. It went from hunting and cowboy stuff with dad in the 50s all the way through to a response to the hippie parenting, which was, in a way, which was make guns, you know, more realistic and make them more a part of everyday life. And so I guess I saw a trend like that. And I was also a little bit surprised in the early days of guns how many real toy bullets came out of these things. Because the whole concept of swallowing them as kids, by the 70s, they got rid of all that, you know, they just like, you can't have guns that shoot toy, you know, bullets are this big so kids can chew on them and choke, you know? So I was kind of shocked by how how sort of technical some of those ‘50s guns were, actually. But most of them were shoot-em-up cowboy things that you put in your holsters and that kind of thing. By the ‘90s, much more tactical. And I also wanted to point out that, like, I did not get into video games at all, and I didn't get into BB guns, because I consider BB guns a kind of real gun. And video games is a whole other story for a whole other time. So that's my long-winded answer. I rarely give a short-winded answer.
Caitlin: So before we started this podcast, David and I were reminiscing a little bit about our childhood and how toy guns came into play, depending on what we were doing. So I brought up Super Soakers and what we called water pistols. Right? Like you'd get a pack of 3 or 5 at the grocery store or at Toys R Us, and we used to bring them to field day at school. So it was totally appropriate to, you know, like you said, hide behind bushes or trees or the slide and like, ambush somebody all at the same time. Right? Like this was the '90s and that was there was nothing wrong with that. And I remember Halloween parades in elementary school and kids would have cap guns. I think they were told like, don't don't fire them. Like they didn't want to hear like the loud popping, but you still had this fabricated weapon that in some ways really did look pretty realistic.
Eric: Yeah, I should say that too. That, like the cap guns are a sort of bizarre subset of toy guns, but because they literally have gunpowder, right? Is essentially a kind of carbon or something. And, um, and I didn't go into that too much because one, there were not very many TV commercials that I could yank off of YouTube about cap guns. There's some from the '50s and some of those are in the article. Um, I didn't go off on that too much because it's almost like, again, in a weird way, it's almost more realistic or something, but mainly because for this particular article, there just were not a ton of commercials about cap guns. But certainly when I was a kid, cap guns were still very popular. Pretty sure they still sell cap guns, I don't know, but um, maybe?
Caitlin: Yeah, it's been a long time since I perused the toy gun aisle. Um, we could probably go on Amazon actually, right now, it's on there. Um, and Devin, you were talking about, uh, like a Western costume that you had at one point.
Devin: Yeah. So which would definitely not fly today. But as a '90s, kid. Uh, there's like an 89ers Day at our school. And I don't know if you remember the, um, Maverick series. Um, but I was going to be Brett Maverick. And so I had like, the vest, deck of cards sort of thing, um, cowboy hat and a holster. And I wanted to bring one of my, um, cap revolvers. And my parents were like, yeah, that's not a good idea. And I was like, but why? And now it's like, oh, that makes a lot more sense.
Eric: I was wondering about that with you Devin, because where you grew up, compared to where I grew up, the fact that you just said "We had an 89ers Day" — that wasn't a phrase that ever came up in Cleveland, Ohio. You know, just so you know, growing up in Cleveland was definitely, well even when I moved to Columbus to go to school. That was two hours below Cleveland, but it may as well have been another state because Cleveland is just, that area, I never knew anybody who went hunting. I never knew anybody who had a gun. I think one of my friend's dad had a pistol somewhere in his house. I never saw it. Um, it wasn't something that I grew up with. So when I think back to — I'm sorry I interrupted — but just when I think that one of the main impetuses that that made me think about this article, too, was I wondered how my mom was really good at, well and this is an old joke we used to make. We used to call it “The Playboy Theory." You know, if you found a Playboy, if your parents went, "That is horrible.! That is terrible! You should never look at that! It's dirty! It's awful!" And they throw it away violently, you, of course, wanted to see what the hell this Playboy was, right? You know, because that made it exciting. If your parents said, "Ah, you don't want to see that? It's just junk." And you'd be like, okay. My mom kind of did that with toy guns. Like, if I did actually say, well, my friends all want to get this one toy gun. She, instead of saying, "They're the worst, they're horrible! Like, you can't, you know, you're never going to have a gun in this house!" You know, she just kind of said, like, well, “What do you want that for?” I mean, I could probably get you that toy for the same amount or, you know, because we were always broke or, um, you know, uh, you know, it just, she did it very calmly. And so I never really wanted a toy gun. I think I did get a Han Solo one at one time, but, um, I think. And that got me thinking about how we work, sort of a connection to how we work in GVPedia these days, about if you just beat somebody over the head with, like, "I think all guns should be off the face of the earth right now!" You know, sure, that'd be great. But you kind of want to go in with a more approachable, realistic, talking, you know, conversational thing like that, you know? Um, anyway, so I got thinking about that too.
Devin: Um, I also like growing up in semi-rural Oklahoma, um, like, my parents had a rifle and a shotgun out on the farm because they were necessities. They weren't for self-defense. But to keep the wild dogs and other critters away from horse pens. But I was not allowed near those, which was very good idea. But I had toy guns galore, I had toy soldiers. I remember, like, I got this gift of, like, a $20, um, like Toys R Us bond or something. And my big spend with that was for this Nerf gun sniper rifle, effective range of 20ft. Um, yeah. So, like, it was just part of life, and didn't really come up. But that was before the mass shooting era. Yeah, and that basically started with Columbine, to a degree.
Eric: Yeah, I mean, so by then I wasn't buying toys anymore. Although who am I kidding, I still buy toys like this, this, uh, punk nutcracker that I have. But anyway, um, I still buy toys, but, um, I remember I when I got down to Columbus and then I, I met some more people who were like, oh, yeah, we had guns. I dated a girl who I went to visit her family in Ashtabula, Ohio, which is really only about 40 minutes away from where I grew up. And there were definitely people, you know, it was more a little more farm-y, um, you know, definitely people had guns up there. So I'm not going to say that all of Northeast Ohio had no guns, because of course they did. But, um, it's just not something that I ever even really had to think about, you know? And then, yeah, by the time of Columbine and all that in the '90s, not unlike when I was doing this story and seeing some of these toy commercials, thinking like just how they're packaged to kids and what sort of cultural, pop cultural milieu, you know, is around them that make them sort of acceptable. And for some reason, it felt like James Bond movies, that's acceptable, but not running around with eight other friends pumping guns like this and shooting isn't. I don't know. I also didn't get into too much of the laser tag thing, which kind of took toy guns into an enclosed space, right? And in its own way, it's sort of an oddly realistic, uh, game to get involved in. But, um, I did throw a couple of those commercials in there. So anyway...
Caitlin: So while you two were chatting, I decided I have Amazon at my fingertips. So let me look up cap guns and toy guns, and there are quite a few to choose from. Ironically, many are labeled to ages eight and up, or in the title they have "Safe for kids." Um, and some are actually inspired by guns that are manufactured here in the United States. They have the the manufacturer names in the title. But, um, I am here recording in Connecticut, and we have I think we were just ranked with the third strongest gun laws in the country. And every one that I've clicked on, with the exception of the Nerf guns, has this disclaimer in red letters that says, "This item cannot be shipped to your selected delivery location. Please choose a different location." So I feel very naive that I didn't, maybe I need to read up on, um, laws and guns in the state of Connecticut, because clearly it's not something that I'm allowed to to purchase here. I guess.
Eric: That's wild. So just those little things, those in a box that you throw on the ground, they explode. I wonder if you can buy those thing.
Caitlin: Poppers. Yeah. So I don't know, it's sort of weird, like some of these more like Halloween-y looking ones. Halloween-y is not a word. Um, so ones for dress up seem to be okay. But the ones that that I guess have the real caps or I don't know exactly what the parameters are, but that's something really interesting, um, to look out for.
Eric: Remember when they used to, wasn't there like a rule that, like, toy guns had to have a little red tip?
Caitlin: Yeah. Red or orange.
Eric: Yeah. I wonder if that's still a thing. Yeah, I feel like not for the squirt guns or Nerf guns, I don't think, because I guess they just consider them so utterly safe and you know, that they don't have to. And they look so wild. I did notice that about the nerf and the squirt guns, the giant soakers, is they sort of look ridiculous. They're pink and orange and green and striped. And, you know, they clearly don't look anything, I mean, sort of, like in there sort of tactical on your arm kind of thing, but they don't really look anything like real guns compared to the old little handguns and stuff. So I don't know, maybe that was a way to get around some of those, um, rules or whatever -- or to feel better about still making guns, but make them look so ridiculous that, you know, but, um, but... oh, I did want to say that, um, a lot a number of people — which is kind of creepy — when I did sort of try to share this [article] on social media and stuff, a number of people said stuff like what? Oh, well, I have friends whose parents just flat out, you know, buy them guns for Christmas now. Like real guns.
Caitlin: Like real guns. Gone are the days where you buy toy guns. Now we're just buy real ones.
Eric: No worry of like, should I get them a toy gun? It's just out the window. And that was creepy. But I also noticed, um, that people had — and I knew they were going to mention this, I even asked you guys about this — but the lead image of the article I just thought made sense for the article, because it's a guy holding a 22 caliber rifle, a little kid, very '50s, you know, happy, holding his his Christmas gift, and there's like a Christmas tree behind him. And I thought, okay, this works for the article, but I knew it wasn't an ad for a toy gun. So of course people had to point out like, Oh, well, that's not actually a toy gun. I had one of those. Okay, okay. I just I just used it 'cause it looked kind of good as a lead, but I get it, it's not a toy gun. So I just want to point that out to anybody who jumps in and says, "You don't know what you're talking about with guns. That's a real gun!" Okay.
Devin: One of the kind of interesting things that's beyond the article, but you mentioning that remind me when I was in, um, Kentucky at Bud's Gun Shop was almost the toy-ification of real guns. Like, you had these, um, brightly colored glocks that are like pink or purple, and like, if you hold one, they feel light, and it's like, this feels like a toy, and it almost looks like a toy in a way too. And then when firing an AR-15 equivalent, like, it just struck me how light and plastic it felt. It was like, this feels like a toy. And like, I don't know if others have had that similar experience where it's like, wow, this just feels toy-like, it might just be me. But I was kind of surprised with, particularly the more modern, polymer-based guns with that toy feel. Whereas if you have something like the Colt 1911, like, there's no mistaking it — that thing's hefty, that's a real gun sort of thing.
Eric: Do you think it's something to do with, and you're talking you're talking to a barely a novice here, but was there not a kind of a sense of trying to, to sell more guns, you make them a little less scary, right? And you make pink ones for the ladies for their purse, you know, and that kind of thing. I mean, maybe that's part of it too, that you're not buying some, you know, 70 pound, you know, surface-to-air missile or something, you know. Trying to make it more, you know, approachable somehow and figure out a way to make them lighter. I don't know.
Devin: Yeah, I mean there's definitely been a element like, and this is with military guns as well, to make them lighter so you're able to carry more ammunition on the battlefield, stuff like that. So lightweight and durable. But there's definitely a trend in the, like, real gun marketing, it seems, and the production of these guns to like try to make them less serious in a way. It's like, oh yeah, here's your purple, pink, or light blue handgun that almost in a way mirrors the sort of Nerf colors. Um, where there's kind of getting to be this almost sliding scale of where one of the reasons Nerf has bright colors is so nobody's going to mistake it for a real gun. Which is, I imagine, one of the reasons why the old, um, cap guns and such have fallen out of favor is because, like, aside from the orange tip, like they do look quite real.
Eric: And it's another sad comment that, you know, Caitlin, I'm sure, you know, you have a child. I'm sure it's not so fun anymore out on the playground to hear "cap cap cap" little noises, even if they're, you know, and that was something that, you know, I joked about the little the little poppers, but I can guess that there's probably school grounds where teachers would, you know, send the kid home if he was throwing those.
Caitlin: Oh, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, anything that looks like a gun, sounds like a gun. Kids even running around making gun shapes with their hands will get in trouble. Uh, we've been to Legoland a couple of times, and they have these giant tubs of Legos, different sizes and colors, and it it's supposed to spur on creativity. And so the kids will sit there and put together, you know, we were there near the holidays. So my daughter was building a Christmas tree, right? And someone had a toy car. But then there's an overwhelming number of kids are running around with swords or guns that they've made out of these Legos, and they're, they're, they're hiding. Right? So again, they're playing that sort of like gang up and ambush sort of style. But, uh, it is to see I mean, some of these kids are like four and five. Uh, and I try to think back to when I was that age and granted, I was the oldest child, so I didn't have older siblings to, uh, to influence what I was watching on TV. But I don't know if I would have had any idea how to to build a faux gun out of Legos when I was five years old.
Devin: Oh, I definitely would have. My preferred instrument of that were K'Nex, and like making pretend guns, pretend swords, seeing how long you can get the sword before it kind of flops over on under its own weight.
Eric: Well there's a weird connection there with, like, laser printing and stuff now. Like, there are these...
Caitlin: The 3D printed guns?
Eric: Yeah, there's odd sort of co-mingling of maybe someone could just design one for fun, you know what I mean? And so is that a toy or is it a workable machine? You know, and this actually got me thinking about when you said such young kids, why are they even thinking about, you know, death. Um, but, um, which is the way I always looked at, but, um, and I wondered — which maybe this is another article I can do — but I recently saw the new Godzilla movie, which was surprisingly good. And, um, not just that, but memories and reading history of World War II. It does make you wonder how and if toy guns were marketed in, or this kind of idea of warring and and soldiers and everything, was marketed in Japan after the war, um, or if it was at all, if toy guns were popular. I'm guessing they probably were. And that is a similar I think Germany and Japan had, oddly enough, similar cultures to America as far as guns and how they look at that kind of stuff. So it will be interesting to to look into that and see how much of that I could find in YouTube. But then maybe it's another idea. But, um, but yeah, it was it was sad and interesting to think about those, I mean, this is a whole other topic, but our heroes were often people who fought and had guns and such, right. Or what we were taught were our heroes. Right? So, um, and you definitely saw that in the '50s commercials for sure. Um, it was really interesting to see there were hardly any from the '70s. Um, peace and love, I guess in the '70s. Disco dancing, probably a lot of disco dancing toys in the '70s. And I mean, you know, Saturday Night Fever toys or something. But, um, there was hardly any. And then the '80s really ramped up, and that fit perfectly with Reagan and all that, which I have a memory of, I'm a little older than you guys, and the world definitely got more militaristic, more scare tactics about the Cold War. Oh, that Rambo, Rambo was a big one. Was a very, very popular movie, a classic R-rated movie the kids all snuck into, you know? So there's a bit of that in the article, too. Some commercials like that. So sorry, I went off there.
Caitlin: The advertising may have been linked to, I mean, post-World War II, the generation that we deemed "the greatest generation," right? These young men came home from war, and we had parades, and we cheered for them. And Vietnam was received in a completely different way.
Eric: I should've mentioned that. Sure.
Caitlin: Right. So, like sending our troops over and then them coming home the way we treated them after that, still treat them today. Those who are, uh, still with us, very different stories, endings to to those, those wars.
Eric: That's another thing I got from my mom was, um, for reminding me of how. I mean, we all know this kind of stuff, I guess, now, but it was a bit of an eye opener when I was a kid that I have generally have a few memories in my head of some of those news stories where they — I'm sorry, no matter if I turn it off or not, my texts still pinging on my computer — um no. I, uh, I remember seeing some of those news stories of coffins being taken off of military planes in America, and my mom being sort of shocked, and she's like, we certainly did not see that even during the Korean War or whatever. And those scenes of people getting shot over there in the battlefield and all that, really did, you know, it spooked people a lot more, you know, and, um, and I think, yeah, Vietnam definitely, I'm sure made toy guns not as popular, you know, by the same, you know, whatever, early to mid-70s. There were a lot of reasons, you know, a lot of cultural reasons. And, you know, also, again, not an expert, but um, sometimes some of the, some of the really nice toy guns were a little expensive. And there was other reasons like that that maybe people just didn't buy them as much. But anyway...
Caitlin: We have, you know, one of our most revered holiday movies of recent generations [A Christmas Story] is based on the Red Ryder B.B. gun, right? Like this two hour Christmas movie is about how can this kid's schem, you know, to, uh, to get his parents or to get Santa to leave a gun.
Eric: Uh, but then I saw one of the actors in, um, The Deer Hunter. Have you ever seen The Deer Hunter? Oh, yes. It's a real uplifting movie. And one of the actors that was in The Deer Hunter, which quick synopsis, if you haven't seen it out there in the virtual world, uh, it's a Vietnam-era movie. It's really great. You should see it. It is completely sad. And there is a very infamous, um, Russian roulette scene. Um, and one of the actors that was in that movie had this hilarious thing on TMZ that he considers it a Christmas movie. Which, I haven't seen it in a while, but part of it takes place during the Christmas season. Also, most of it filmed in Cleveland, Ohio. But anyway, um, and uh, it was, uh, took part in the Christmas season. So he's trying to hype it is. You should watch this every year for Christmas. Don't watch The Deer Hunter if you want to get in a Christmas mood.
Caitlin: No, don't. Maybe don't watch it at...
Eric: I mean it's great acting, it's some of the best acting you can ever, ever see.
Caitlin: If you're what in the mental health world we call a "highly sensitive person," don't watch it at all. Don't read the synopsis online. Don't go to Rotten Tomatoes. Like just don't watch it. Disclaimer. You know, just, it's something... I the only reason I watched it, it was an assignment in a class that I took, a history class on the Vietnam War.
Eric: I was finding it interesting because you mentioned that, um, A Christmas Story — also filmed in Cleveland — probably about four years after Deer Hunter was filmed. We even got picked to be that weird Christmas town. But anyway....
Caitlin: Maybe you had good tax write offs for, uh, for directors and....
Eric: Probably. Yeah.
Caitlin: Um, just quickly, what would you say surprised you most about what you learned in the research that you were doing?
Eric: So, I kind of talked about it before, the way that it seems obvious, but the way that it was the guns and the toys were so tied to sort of ostensibly harmless pop cultural things like TV shows and movies, rather than more tactical ideas of the '80s and '90s, and the sort of warlike, you know, verbiage and stuff that was used in the '90s commercials compared to the sort of fun kid in his cowboy outfit, 1950s commercials. Um, the guns that actually shot bullets. I was pretty shocked by that. Uh, and a lot of them, I mean, this is pop cultural film guy stuff, but how these commercials tried to mimic the movies and TV shows that they were coming from, I found very fun and interesting, um, uh, if not exactly surprising. But I thought it was neat how, you know, if they were talking about a James Bond-type silencer gun, um, you know, the scene tried to look like a little, you know, a little, uh, detective movie or, you know, spy movie. So, um, that wasn't wildly surprising, but it was neat to see. Kind of made me wonder how many young directors might have got their start in, uh, TV commercials, but, um, probably a lot. Also, it's fun to watch because, like Kurt Russell, who was in the new the new, not very good Monarch, uh, Godzilla TV show, he was in a couple of these toy gun commercials, it was one of the first jobs he got. This is a whole other topic, but the shrinking of time, where you can see actors that still work today pop up in some of these commercials from 50 years ago, you know? So that was kind of fun. But the most surprising for me, or I guess educational, was just seeing how it really mimicked wider pop cultural trends, you know, and it wasn't pop culture anymore by the '80s, it was, “Oh my God, the Russians are going to come get us again!” You know, it was Rambo, it was Reagan. And it was like more sort of serious, which again mimicked where the NRA was going. And making a very loose analogy here, but where the NRA was going with its selling of guns, and where the religious right was going with, uh, evangelicals, which is a whole other story for another thing, but that that sort of, you know, weird, you know, culture war stuff.
Caitlin: Just to tie in, as a mom, when I was putting together the intro and the questions for this podcast, I was curious how many children have been injured with toy guns. And I didn't do a deep dive into what those injuries look like specifically, although when I googled it, a lot of eye injuries seem to come up.
Eric: Sure — "You're gonna shoot your eye out kid!"
Caitlin: Right! "You'll shoot your eye out!" So literally these are concerns, valid concerns. But there was an article in Newsweek that showed from 1990 to 2016, over 360,000 children had been injured with non-powder firearms. So that's an average of almost 14,000 children a year. Um, so anything from bruises, which I don't know, like if you jack up your Nerf gun, or if you can use airsoft guns. Um, I know kids who played with those in college. Um, the eyeball ruptures, choking, all those sorts of things. So, uh, just as a, as a mom, it felt like I couldn't talk about toy guns without thinking about, like, the injuries that were created.
Eric: The ones that I would think of off the bat just when I was a kid, totally anecdotal, were usually the choking things. Most parents, BB guns were definitely something that most of my friends and the parents raising them did not want to have BB guns around because, you know, kids would always say, Oh, I'll just, you know, shoot it mice in the backyard or something. But, um, they'd end up shooting each other, right? And so that's clear, we definitely get injured by that. But usually it was choking implements. So, you know, people were a little more worried about kids just swallowing things. This is a a fun side note, but since I believe Devin is a Star Wars fan, when the original Boba Fett toy came out, the little Boba Fett action figure, he had a missile on his back, and you could press the button and the missile would shoot out, right? But you can only get this through the mail. You had to cut out the the little things in the back of the toys and send them in the mail, and then you got it back. And my friend across the street got one of these. They only made like 1000 of them or something. And then it was, the company stopped making them because kids were swallowing them and choking on them. And my friend threw his out and I said, Why did you do that?! And this is how much, I guess the parents that I grew up with were really serious. He said, "Well my mom said I might choke on it." I'm like, So don't eat it, don't eat it! It's already worth like 500 bucks. I was so mad at that kid. But, you know, he listened to his mom, so, you know.
Caitlin: Hey, can't can't fault the kid for listening to their mother.
Eric: Yeah, can't fault the kid for that.
Devin: And I would be interested on how many of those injuries are from, like, airsoft or stuff like paintball because, I mean like if you get shot with a paintball gun, which I have, like you're, you're going to get a bruise. And almost the same thing with the airsoft. Like there's going to be kind of a welt on it. So. Like I would think-slash-hope for that article that they excluded the ones that are like in the normal course of going into an airsoft corner, and getting whacked with some pellets. Um, but it's still kind of harrowing. And there's definitely like the massive concern with eye injuries, because like if it hits the eye or face area — with airsoft and paintball — they can do serious damage. Yeah, it is kind of part of the, like kind of spectrum in a way of from real gun to toy gun. And then you have like the airsoft and paintball sort of thing in between. And where like that they actually do injure people. They're light injuries, but like, you know when you've been whacked by one. And while it's outside the scope of the article, like I think that's been another trend in the probably '90s to 2000s up to present, where you have more of that sort of militarized aspect, because like with the airsoft, it does look like a real gun at first glance.
Eric: Like I didn't want to mention that, with the previous question about surprising was -- and it's one of the last commercials in that article -- is there's a gun that has three settings. One is just shoots one bullet. And these things are about that long, right? I think it's a Nerf thing. I think it's a Nerf thing. So they're soft, but probably has a plastic end just to make it fly. But um, and then there was a second setting where it would shoot three blasts, and then there was a third setting where unending shots or whatever, right?
Caitlin: Your machine gun Nerf gun, essentially?
Eric: Yeah! What a weird thing! Like it was such a direct corollary to real, some real guns. And I knew that commercial that commercial was probably, I think, from like, say, early 2000s. And I'm kind of guessing that after all these school shootings, because literally the commercial is kids going around the building, right, like running with these things and setting their setting and like, I'm pretty sure maybe those commercials aren't around anymore. Um, or at least they shouldn't be. But that was kind of creepy and surprising that something that so close to the way a real gun like that would be designed.
Caitlin: So head and neck were the most common injured body parts in those 360,000 injuries, the average age of the injured child was 12 years old, and boys accounted for almost, what percent do you think of injuries?
Eric: 99.9%.
Devin: It's got to be 90.
Caitlin: 90%. Good job Devin! 90%. So yes, while I was playing with tea sets and all these, uh, the boys were running around shooting themselves in the eyes apparently. So anyway...
Eric: Anyway, yeah, they must be aiming at heads, I guess.
Caitlin: Yeah, whether it's unintentional or not. Right? Um, but certainly it goes back to A Christmas Story.
Eric: So maybe they follow all those dumb scenes in movies when a guy runs out of bullets and then he goes like this, oh, he throwshis gun. Maybe we were doing that.
Caitlin: Oh, that's true, that's absolutely true. I know grown ups who have hit themselves in the face trying to take a cork out of a champagne bottle. So, um...
Eric: Quick, look up those stats. That I want to see.
Devin: One kind of note that I, as we're towards wrapping up, is — and I don't have the data for like Europe and elsewhere — kids, and particularly boys across the world, like to play war type stuff. And so they'll have the toy guns and toy swords and stuff. But there's a reason why we don't have an epidemic of sword violence. There's a reason why most other advanced countries don't have an epidemic of gun violence. Like with the swords, like, oftentimes they're strictly regulated. Or to where like, they're just not as lethal as firearms. And so, I just wanted to kind of put that out there that playing war is often debatable among parents on whether you want your kid to do that. Yeah, but kind of like violent video games — there's no real correlation between kids playing war and growing up and actually shooting, to a degree. But there is a definite correlation between allowing easy access to lethal guns and these shootings that are at epidemic levels.
Eric: And I know, I know, we're wrapping up, but just as an anecdotal, um, you know, I was in a band, New Bomb Turks, if anyone wants to look 'em up. We toured in Europe a lot, and we would get in these gun discussions sometimes because you go over to Europe and everyone there, you're from America and they just assume you have tons of guns, and cowboy movies are your favorites and everything. And, um, I recognize I have a couple of memories of talking with people about it. Like toy guns weren't always a thing because real guns just kind of weren't around. So some people are, again, anecdotal, but, um, some people's idea of guns was more from like cool old crime movies, you know, a Godfather or something like that. One scene where, like, a guy pulled out a gun, and almost more in that very European sort of, uh, you know, beautiful, existential, old, you know, '40s movie or something. Whereas I think, uh, there is a notion in America for sure that, like, you could see that some parents think of toy guns as a kind of preparation for when the kid's going to have to own, "have to" own a real gun, you know. And that's a whole other story for another day. But there's a I think there's a little feeling of that, that some of these guns are like, well, because the assumption is that the kid's probably going to get a real gun someday, and you can't buy a four year old gun, at least in most states. So, uh, hell, get him a toy gun and he can start aiming it, I don't know, aiming at squirrels in the backyard. So, I mean, there's part of that, too, you know? Not that there isn't hunting in other countries, but, you know, anyway...
Caitlin: Well, we appreciate you taking the time to, one, to research and write the article in the first place. Again, like I said when I opened, it was one of our most viewed articles of of 2023. But to come here and discuss this with us, to allow us to reminisce a little bit, but to also punctuate what, uh, gun culture is like in the United States. Right? It starts from childhood, and advertising is a way that for many years we have looped children into falling in love with certain toys. And, um, toy guns certainly are not any different. So quickly, before we go, Eric, I just wanted to give you a chance to give a pitch for why our listeners should sign up for our Armed With Reason Substack.
Eric: Sure. Um, well, to put a point on what you just said, too, there was a time when there were actual toy cigarette commercials, and there aren't those anymore. So to use that hopeful corollary that we always try to use in the gun violence prevention movement that, you know, we'll work at guns like we worked at cigarettes. Um, there are less toy gun TV commercials these days, I think. So, Armed With Reason — every day we try to put, um, original, new or, repurposed original articles every day at Armed With Reason. For me, I thought it was a way, when Devin approached me about editing it, um, GVPedia itself is very, very info, statistics based — which is great, and we need that. And I think our Substack is a way to be a little more, a little more bloggy, and sort of try to have some personal stories or more extended articles about a lot of myth busting, um, a lot of gun lobby myths that we would like to bust. And, um, we put a lot of articles like that up. And again, you know, we're trying to get more interviews, podcasts like this, um, just to give them sort of a more, I don't want to say necessarily always personal, but just a more relatable, um, pull it together, kind of pull all the numbers together stories to get on the site, um, to get people to rethink things and about our weird, obsessed gun culture in America. And I'm really proud to do it. I like getting up every day and working on the site, and, um, as much as it can be dower and get people down sometimes, a lot of the stories and a lot of the information that you guys compile for us, mostly — and Gun Violence Archives — really gives us perspective and gives us some hope that people will see these hard numbers and personal stories, and try to vote in people who support good legislation. So, again, long winded. I told you, I warned you! I'm not good for sound bites.
Caitlin: No, you did great. So I'm going to wrap us up for today's episode. Devin and I, uh, if you are listening and you would like to give us some topic ideas, Devin and I are going to be on for next week's podcast, and we're always interested in what our listeners might want to learn more about. So feel free to get in touch with us, and we'll check in with everybody soon. And thanks again for listening.
Eric: Thank you very much. Thanks, guys.
Devin: Thank you.
Eric Davidson is Senior Editor at Armed With Reason. His first book, We Never Learn, has recently been reissued in an Expanded Edition.
Photo by Shannon Van Esley.