Kids and Toy Guns?

So here’s a question: do you let your kids play with toy guns? Playing sheriff with a toy pop gun revolver? What about water guns? Nerf guns? Where do you draw the line of guns aren’t toys, but they are.

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(I hope you don’t mind I made this a stand alone topic, @Kelly!)

My kids all played with toy guns - nerf, water, and snap guns.

The rule was never at the head - and ONLY toy guns. We talked about the different types of guns a lot and I was adamant about safety. Real guns were always locked up when they were little and we made a really big deal about real guns when they were unlocked.

We had nerf wars a lot when the kids were teenagers :slight_smile:

We also played video games with the kids and discussed video games vs reality - which was always a “buzz kill” during the video games. Oh, well… :smiley:

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Water guns and nerf here. Sometimes we turn off most of the lights, and have a family Nerf war. I’m partial to the Lever Action Zombie Strike Gun with the 30 round drum.

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@Dawn that was some kinda black magic you performed there. Split moving my comment to a new thread. Haha!! Of course I don’t mind! Great idea!
I had a coworker that would not let his kids play with guns. Period. Didn’t matter if it was water or nerf, bright colored, etc. Nothing. He didn’t want his kids playing with anything that resembled a firearm until they were of age to fully know the difference. Seemed like he put more of a fear into guns than educational. But, his kids, his parenting.
@45IPAC “lever action zombie strike gun with a 30 round drum” (for some reason i read this with the same excitement Ralphie talked about his red rider bb gun in Christmas Story) I like the way you think! Haha!
I recently involved nerf guns at work for a March long game for my team. It. Was. Awesome! They loved it! Fun to see grown men act like kids when there’s a nerf gun involved. :rofl:

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They had every type of toy gun imaginable. All 5 are all grown, and they’re ok.

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If I eventually have kids, I wouldn’t mind anything that doesn’t look real. Anything that looks relatively real will be painted. Also, I’ll do what my dad did, and when the kid gets a BB gun for Christmas, all toy guns go away, and pretty much all children’s toys go away. Then you start getting dull knives, BMX bikes, and a real tackle box.

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We really have just started the greatgrandbabys gun education. I’m thinking if this goes well I’ll let her use my Bug-A-Salt for killing flies :slight_smile:

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It’s as awesome as it sounds.

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This is a textbook method of how to train children to the realities of nerf-guns. Oh, and use Christmas Day at Grandpa’s house as your training ground.

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This looks a lot like a couple of Christmases in my family, @AAlan!

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My kids did. My grandson does. I never really thought of any line with my kids because I grew up toting a .38 spill snub nose cap gun pretending I was a cop. Went everywhere with me.

The only thing I noticed with toy guns…and this was only after I spent time in the Army and went on a couple of combat deployments…I don’t like them pointed at me anymore LOL!. But that’s only with the more realistic ones.

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Ya know, I’d completely forgotten this… the first gun I ever built was a repeating rubberband rifle my first ex and I created for his favorite nephew. I designed it and we built it together. It was pretty cool… you could load it with 12 rubber bands at once and fire them singly or as fast as you could pull the trigger. We were broke college students and we built it out of part of a broomstick, a scrap of 2x4 and a sheet of broken 1\4" plastic from I don’t remember what.
We had one broom, and I spent the next year sweeping with that half-height broom