Nomercy

In response to others posts about the police having to decipher whether a criminal is holding a toy gun or not, in such situations, this is irrelevant, there would be no decision. Police are trained to react to what's happening, if a criminal is dumb enough to point a piece of plastic at a law enforcement officer, he'll be shot, and I for one would accredit the officer for doing so. In that situation, the police just don't know, they don't know if it's a loaded gun, unloaded, real, or fake, or if the criminal would pull the trigger or not, or if the criminal is a good shot or not, there are too many variables for them to have to consider each one, they just know that there's a gun in the hand of someone not wearing a badge, and it's his job to relieve the situation as quickly and safely as possible.

As for taking them away from kids, I don't think that kids should have realistic enough looking guns to be able to trick the average joe into thinking it's real. If we make guns look too lifelike, it may in fact blur the lines between a real gun and a toy gun in the child's mind, "look little brother, daddy's gun looks just like mine." I played with "pony boys" throughout my childhood, which look real enough for me, but I always knew the difference between those and my old man's revolvers, because they looked different. Toy manufacturers need to remember that children don't need realistic looking guns, because their games are all fantasy, they can turn a back yard treehouse into "Ft. Geronimo" and fight of the indians (no offense was meant to Native Americans by this) or into Star Base 1 and fight off invading aliens or Ft. Knox and fight back the bank robbers, and most the time they can have the same amount of fun pretending that a couple sticks or even their own hands are pistols instead of having very detailed toys, sure it makes it a little more fun to have a trigger to pull, but you can put a trigger on almost anything.

What I think needs to be done, rather than take all toy guns from children, is continue to ban realistic looking toys, and do more training of those that are typically victimized by criminals with toy guns, even when I worked part time at a pizza hut in rural Kansas as a high school kid I was trained a bit how to recognize counterfiet currency and trained what to do in case of a robbery, as I'm sure New Yorkers/big city dwellers are even moreso, how hard could it be to go over typical robbery cenarios a bit more extensively. Gas station attendants are often trained to remember/notice certain identifying qualities about robbers, notice scars and significant facial features and the clothes they're wearing, hair color etc, so why would it be so much more difficult to teach them to look for seams or to attempt to look down the barrel, or to note the magazine or slide releases or note if the cylinder is loaded or even open ended or even moveable for that matter. As long as very realistic looking toys aren't available, I'd bet with certain training, even a single day's training and a test would be enough to let most people be able to identify most fakes at a distance of across the counter, let alone if it got up in their face. I'm certain that small business employees in such cities are trained more than I was in counterfeit currency identification, so how much more would it take to teach them to identify a couple things that are dead give aways on guns? If it's close enough for them not to tell, then they should treat it as such, but when a guy pulls a revolver that has a seam flange an eighth inch tall and a plug an inch down the barrel and no holes in the face of a cylinder that appears to be the same piece as the frame, I think I'd be a bit curious?

Screw the 10 ring, keep them in the zero!!!