Replica guns cause confusion in U.S.

Press, 22 December 1987, Page 19

Replica guns cause confusion in U.S.

By

JIM WOLF

of Reuters Washington

A sheriff’s deputy in California responded to a report that armed men were prowling a schoolground. Minutes later, the officer used his shotgun to kill Leonard Falcon, aged 19, who had pointed what turned out to be a plastic toy gun at him, the kind used in a game called laser tag.

The officer involved in the incident last April, said later he had mistaken the toy for a real weapon - a recurring problem, even for experienced police, as play guns are made to look increasingly real, officials say. “We are facing a serious national problem,” Congressman Mel Levine told a recent news conference to highlight his concern as Christmas approached. Levine, a Democrat from southern California, where many of the most serious incidents have taken place, has submitted a bill that would force manufacturers to mark play guns distinctively to make them easy to spot. "Realistic toy guns can-

not always be identified as such by law enforcement officers even in the best of circumstances,” said Levine. “It is unfair and unrealistic to expect them always to make the correct distinction when they think they are staring down the barrel of a real gun.”

Play guns represent an estimated SUS2OO million a year market for American toy makers. Among the hottest sellers are look-alike Uzi submachine guns that fire caps, water guns modelled after an Ml 6 automatic rifle and a pellet gun made to look like a .357 magnum Colt Python pistol. Three months ago, sheriff’s deputies in Los Angeles County drew their guns on a mother and her three children after her teen-age son pointed a replica of a .45-calibre pistol at a plain clothed detective on a southern California roadway. One big maker of toy guns, Daisy Manufacturing, has begun to add bright orange fluorescent markings to its toy guns, to distinguish them from the real thing. Toys R Us, which describes itself as the

nation’s largest toy retailer, has told manufacturers it would no longer handle perfect replicas without distinctive markings. Some consumer advocates want all play guns to be painted bright yellow.

Sharper Image, a San Francisco-based retail and mail-order chain with 45 national outlets, decided to stop selling a cap-firing Uzi replica and one modelled after a Beretta handgun, according to Lisa Boucher, a company spokeswoman. Levine said he might eventually stiffen his legislation to include an allout ban on toy guns if the present measure failed to remedy the problem. But he said any such ban would certainly run into strong opposition, notably from toymakers, unless a more conservative approach wase tried first. Jerald Vaughn, the executive director of the International Association of Police Chiefs, lauded Levine’s bill but called it only the first step.

"Police officers will not be able to stop and make an evaluation: decisions to protect a life or lives by shooting are by their very nature split-second deci-

sions,’’ said Vaughn. No national figures are available on the number of serious incidents involving fake firearms.

The United States Public Interest Research Group, a non-partisan consumer advocacy group, would like Levine’s bill to lead to a total ban on toys designed to look like firearms because of the potential risk to children, according to its staff attorney, Pamela Gilbert. “Far too many tragedies and near-tragedies have occurred involving toy guns that were mistaken for the real thing,” she told the Levine news conference.

Vaughn, in his statement, suggested the problem went beyond mere toys to the violence regularly portrayed on United States television and in popular American films. He said toy guns were simply another sign of a society that “desensitises” its children to violence, by teaching them to play with guns and “kill” each other for sport. “As a society, we may need to re-evaluate the lesson really being taught by giving our children Uzis for Christmas,” Vaughn said.