One late spring day in April, several years ago—one of the last breezy afternoons before the suffocating summer humidity would descend on the rolling green hills of central Virginia—I went to visit friends in Charlottesville. I was on a break from Gaza at the time, where I’d been living for a year and a half while working on a security project for an NGO and reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the Virginia Quarterly Review. I’d grown used to the simmering sounds of war; I would hear the thump of Hamas and Islamic Jihad mortars during my afternoon runs and would wake to my windows rattling as Israeli gunboats fired at Palestinian fishermen. Still, I remained hypervigilant—ready to fight, or flee, at any second.
As I approached my friends’ doorstep, I was suddenly caught in an ambush of foam darts, and I looked down to see their seven-year-old son, Jack, grinning behind an azalea bush, aiming his Nerf blaster at my chest.
“Gotcha!” Jack shouted, before sprinting off behind the house in a flash of spindly limbs and towheaded glee.
Jack’s ambushes became a ritual we’d reenact every time I visited. Jack’s first blaster was a Nite Finder, a pistol that fired single foam darts with rubber tips, and had a mock laser sight mounted in front of the trigger assembly, mimicking the emerging fashion in tactical handguns. It was made of gray-and-yellow molded plastic, and though the blaster’s grip bore some resemblance to the sweep of a real semiautomatic pistol grip, it would’ve been more at home on the set of Lost in Space than Die Hard. A few years later, when Jack and his family moved to Nebraska, he got a Nerf rifle called the N-Strike Alpha Trooper CS-18, which featured a detachable stock and a magazine that held 18 foam darts. It had a charging handle on the barrel like a pump shotgun, allowing for rapid fire and a max range of 35 feet—which meant Jack could hide around the side of the house and get me coming down the driveway.
Last year, when Jack was 13 and I was 35, I had the honor of teaching him the fundamentals of firearms safety at a range near my home in Bozeman, Montana, using the same Marlin .22 rifle I’ve had since my 10th or 11th birthday. I remember when my dad and I first brought that rifle home: Running my hands over the smooth, dark-stained wood stock, and the fascination I felt whenever I slid it out of its khaki-colored soft case, the delightful clack of the bolt sliding home and locking down. There was no kick, and wearing earplugs, the shots sounded like bursts from an air compressor—but all the same, the rifle was not a toy. When I put the stock to my shoulder and the scope in front of my eye, I immediately felt more grown-up. Jack clearly did as well, treating the gun with respect and seriousness.
I spent years working as a war correspondent, and for a good portion of the past year I have been reporting on the National Rifle Association’s fear-mongering, gun culture, and the crisis of gun violence in America. Until recently, I had never read too far into our Nerf play, mine and Jack’s, and I had never heard people link Nerf blasters to real violence the way they did with violent video games and movies. But in an era of mass shootings, I’ve started to reconsider the banality of Nerf blasters and other toy guns.
Over the past two decades, Nerf has upped the ante on the power and functionality of its blasters. One model shoots foam balls up to 100 feet per second—fast enough to sting bare skin. Some models, such as the “Doomlands” series, are cartoonish in their appearance, taking the concept of mega firepower to gonzo levels. Others, like the N-Strike models, have become increasingly streamlined, drawing closer to the souped-up tactical firearms that now dominate the real gun market, namely the endless variations on the popular AR-15.
Do toys like these play any part in the fetishizing of guns? Do they blur the line between fantasy and reality, helping to inspire mass shooters like Nikolas Cruz and Dylann Roof? Or are they just good, clean, foam fun? I don’t know if it’s possible to answer those questions, but I know one thing unequivocally: if the kinds of blasters that Nerf offers today had existed when I was little, I would have been completely, hopelessly enthralled.
Nerf’s deep dive into imaginative gunplay began humbly in 1989, when the company introduced Blast-a-Ball, a pair of simple plastic tubes with plunger handles on one end that could launch foam balls up to 30 feet. Nerf called it the “shoot ’em, dodge ’em, catch ’em” game, and, from the very beginning, it was clear that Nerf did not intend for its new toy to be enjoyed alone—each box came with two blasters.
I was born in 1981, and I remember playing with those original ball blasters, but the Nerf products that really took my suburban Washington, D.C., neighborhood by storm were the company’s foam footballs. The Turbo was about four-fifths the size of a leather pigskin, which made it easy to throw spirals. In 1991, the same year that Nerf introduced the Vortex—a whistling football with rocket fins—the company also launched the Bow ‘n’ Arrow, a blaster in the shape of a bow that fired large foam missiles. Nerf dominated the birthday-party scene that year. Now, almost 30 years later, Nerf balls appear to have been overshadowed by its toy weapons.
Since their debut in the late 1980s, Nerf blasters have evolved into sophisticated toys capable of rapid fire, some models sporting what are known (on real guns) as high-capacity magazines, each holding a dozen rounds or more—in some cases, as many as 200. Nerf has sometimes looked to historical gun models for inspiration, like the Nerf Zombie Strike SlingFire Blaster, which uses the lever-action reload of the .30-30 Winchester Model 94 rifle, with dashes of fluorescent green and orange to diminish its verisimilitude. The overall aesthetic of Nerf’s blaster lineup remains playful and sci-fi, with wild color schemes and plenty of high-visibility orange, especially on the business end of the barrels. But anyone with a remotely trained eye can see that Nerf’s newer models are edging closer to the features of what are commonly known as assault weapons.
The expiration of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban in 2004—along with a 2005 law that protected firearms manufacturers from lawsuits—contributed to a period of furious growth in the firearms market. Sales of handguns more than quadrupled between 1999 and 2016 (spiking in 2013 after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in anticipation of incoming gun-control legislation). Firearms imports into the United States also increased fivefold. After ten years of restrictions, manufacturers were now free to market a seemingly limitless array of military-style semiautomatic rifles and accessories, benefiting from the free advertising of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At gun shows and in a proliferating number of firearms publications and enthusiast websites, hunting rifles and shotguns took a backseat to variations on the AR-15, the AK-47, and the Bullpup, a close-quarters combat rifle favored by the Israeli and British militaries.
Nerf appears to have taken notice of both the marketing and design tactics of the firearms industry over the years. The most obvious parallel between Nerf’s newer blasters and their deadly cousins is their focus on modularity. A seemingly infinite spectrum of accessories have made semiautomatic “black rifles” such as the AR-15 a hit among enthusiasts of real firearms, spurring enormous growth in aftermarket products. Similarly, recent upgrades to Nerf products have allowed for the reconfiguration of the company’s rifle-style blasters into pistols, and the addition of the Picatinny rail offers users the opportunity to mount accessories such as flashlights, bipods, and red-dot sights.
The company’s Modulus series includes a lineup of accessories that are obviously toy versions of the real add-ons beloved by black-rifle enthusiasts, including foregrips that mount under barrels, faux laser sights, collapsible stocks, and long-range barrel extenders. Certain battery-operated models are even capable of automatic fire, and some kids have figured out how to “bump fire” their nonautomatic models the same way you can bump fire a semiautomatic rifle: by hooking your finger around the trigger and moving the entire rifle back and forth.
Though there were lots of toy guns on the market that looked real when I was a kid, the opposite was not true: the only real guns I ever saw or handled were unmistakably not toys. They were made of black or polished steel and smooth, stained wood. (If they had plastic on them at all, it was black.) But just as Nerf seems to have co-opted the infinite accessorizing possibilities of the actual firearms industry, owners of AR-15s are sending their guns to third-party customizers to incorporate more playful features into their design: a gun can be anodized in virtually any color, or have a custom wrap applied featuring Star Wars and Marvel themes.
Growing up, my friends and I had toy-gun arsenals that would’ve equipped us for any conflict from the Revolutionary War to Vietnam: long-barreled muskets purchased on field trips to Colonial Williamsburg, chrome six-shooters, cork popguns and rubber-band shooters, and battery-operated squirt guns that looked like exact replicas of the TEC-9 and MAC-10. A company called Zap It sold guns shaped like miniature Uzis, which shot blood-colored ink that would stain clothes briefly, then quickly fade and disappear. (An ad from the late 1980s shows a kid popping out from behind a door to shoot the mailman. A few seconds later, his dad shoots him from behind the cover of the morning paper.)
The first toy gun I remember playing with was a chrome cap gun in the shape of a .45 pistol. I was so young I don’t even remember holding it for the first time, but it stayed in my toy bin well into my middle-school years. It had been my dad’s when he was a kid in the 1950s and had plastic grips with real stippling and fired caps from a roll, which meant there was real smoke. It smelled musty and oxidized, like everything else that came out of my Nana’s basement in Missouri—a smell I associated with a grandfather and great-uncles I had never known, who’d fought in the trenches of WWI and on the seas of the North Atlantic, in the Pacific, and across Europe in WWII.
I knew boys who weren’t allowed to play with toy guns at all. Our grandparents were part of the Greatest Generation, survivors of epic struggles that earned them awe and reverence bordering on fear. But we were the children of the Baby Boomers—a generation sent to fight in Vietnam, a confusing conflict with no clear objectives that killed and maimed young draftees by the tens of thousands. Many young people came out of the 1960s committed to breaking the cycle of macho violence by emphasizing nonviolent play at home. When they had kids of their own—my generation, somewhere between Gen Xers and millennials—they forbade backyard war games and the props they thought were necessary to play them.
These attempts were futile. Whenever I was at a friend’s house who wasn’t allowed to have toy guns, we used our fingers for pistols and sticks for rifles. We made machine-gun noises and explosions with our mouths, imagining bullets kicking up dust around the enemy fortifications, smoke and splintered timber rising skyward in theatrical columns of smoke.
by Elliott Woods, Topic | Read more:
Image: Greg Marinovich
As I approached my friends’ doorstep, I was suddenly caught in an ambush of foam darts, and I looked down to see their seven-year-old son, Jack, grinning behind an azalea bush, aiming his Nerf blaster at my chest. “Gotcha!” Jack shouted, before sprinting off behind the house in a flash of spindly limbs and towheaded glee.
Jack’s ambushes became a ritual we’d reenact every time I visited. Jack’s first blaster was a Nite Finder, a pistol that fired single foam darts with rubber tips, and had a mock laser sight mounted in front of the trigger assembly, mimicking the emerging fashion in tactical handguns. It was made of gray-and-yellow molded plastic, and though the blaster’s grip bore some resemblance to the sweep of a real semiautomatic pistol grip, it would’ve been more at home on the set of Lost in Space than Die Hard. A few years later, when Jack and his family moved to Nebraska, he got a Nerf rifle called the N-Strike Alpha Trooper CS-18, which featured a detachable stock and a magazine that held 18 foam darts. It had a charging handle on the barrel like a pump shotgun, allowing for rapid fire and a max range of 35 feet—which meant Jack could hide around the side of the house and get me coming down the driveway.
Last year, when Jack was 13 and I was 35, I had the honor of teaching him the fundamentals of firearms safety at a range near my home in Bozeman, Montana, using the same Marlin .22 rifle I’ve had since my 10th or 11th birthday. I remember when my dad and I first brought that rifle home: Running my hands over the smooth, dark-stained wood stock, and the fascination I felt whenever I slid it out of its khaki-colored soft case, the delightful clack of the bolt sliding home and locking down. There was no kick, and wearing earplugs, the shots sounded like bursts from an air compressor—but all the same, the rifle was not a toy. When I put the stock to my shoulder and the scope in front of my eye, I immediately felt more grown-up. Jack clearly did as well, treating the gun with respect and seriousness.
I spent years working as a war correspondent, and for a good portion of the past year I have been reporting on the National Rifle Association’s fear-mongering, gun culture, and the crisis of gun violence in America. Until recently, I had never read too far into our Nerf play, mine and Jack’s, and I had never heard people link Nerf blasters to real violence the way they did with violent video games and movies. But in an era of mass shootings, I’ve started to reconsider the banality of Nerf blasters and other toy guns.
Over the past two decades, Nerf has upped the ante on the power and functionality of its blasters. One model shoots foam balls up to 100 feet per second—fast enough to sting bare skin. Some models, such as the “Doomlands” series, are cartoonish in their appearance, taking the concept of mega firepower to gonzo levels. Others, like the N-Strike models, have become increasingly streamlined, drawing closer to the souped-up tactical firearms that now dominate the real gun market, namely the endless variations on the popular AR-15.
Do toys like these play any part in the fetishizing of guns? Do they blur the line between fantasy and reality, helping to inspire mass shooters like Nikolas Cruz and Dylann Roof? Or are they just good, clean, foam fun? I don’t know if it’s possible to answer those questions, but I know one thing unequivocally: if the kinds of blasters that Nerf offers today had existed when I was little, I would have been completely, hopelessly enthralled.
Nerf’s deep dive into imaginative gunplay began humbly in 1989, when the company introduced Blast-a-Ball, a pair of simple plastic tubes with plunger handles on one end that could launch foam balls up to 30 feet. Nerf called it the “shoot ’em, dodge ’em, catch ’em” game, and, from the very beginning, it was clear that Nerf did not intend for its new toy to be enjoyed alone—each box came with two blasters.
I was born in 1981, and I remember playing with those original ball blasters, but the Nerf products that really took my suburban Washington, D.C., neighborhood by storm were the company’s foam footballs. The Turbo was about four-fifths the size of a leather pigskin, which made it easy to throw spirals. In 1991, the same year that Nerf introduced the Vortex—a whistling football with rocket fins—the company also launched the Bow ‘n’ Arrow, a blaster in the shape of a bow that fired large foam missiles. Nerf dominated the birthday-party scene that year. Now, almost 30 years later, Nerf balls appear to have been overshadowed by its toy weapons.
Since their debut in the late 1980s, Nerf blasters have evolved into sophisticated toys capable of rapid fire, some models sporting what are known (on real guns) as high-capacity magazines, each holding a dozen rounds or more—in some cases, as many as 200. Nerf has sometimes looked to historical gun models for inspiration, like the Nerf Zombie Strike SlingFire Blaster, which uses the lever-action reload of the .30-30 Winchester Model 94 rifle, with dashes of fluorescent green and orange to diminish its verisimilitude. The overall aesthetic of Nerf’s blaster lineup remains playful and sci-fi, with wild color schemes and plenty of high-visibility orange, especially on the business end of the barrels. But anyone with a remotely trained eye can see that Nerf’s newer models are edging closer to the features of what are commonly known as assault weapons.
The expiration of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban in 2004—along with a 2005 law that protected firearms manufacturers from lawsuits—contributed to a period of furious growth in the firearms market. Sales of handguns more than quadrupled between 1999 and 2016 (spiking in 2013 after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in anticipation of incoming gun-control legislation). Firearms imports into the United States also increased fivefold. After ten years of restrictions, manufacturers were now free to market a seemingly limitless array of military-style semiautomatic rifles and accessories, benefiting from the free advertising of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At gun shows and in a proliferating number of firearms publications and enthusiast websites, hunting rifles and shotguns took a backseat to variations on the AR-15, the AK-47, and the Bullpup, a close-quarters combat rifle favored by the Israeli and British militaries.
Nerf appears to have taken notice of both the marketing and design tactics of the firearms industry over the years. The most obvious parallel between Nerf’s newer blasters and their deadly cousins is their focus on modularity. A seemingly infinite spectrum of accessories have made semiautomatic “black rifles” such as the AR-15 a hit among enthusiasts of real firearms, spurring enormous growth in aftermarket products. Similarly, recent upgrades to Nerf products have allowed for the reconfiguration of the company’s rifle-style blasters into pistols, and the addition of the Picatinny rail offers users the opportunity to mount accessories such as flashlights, bipods, and red-dot sights.
The company’s Modulus series includes a lineup of accessories that are obviously toy versions of the real add-ons beloved by black-rifle enthusiasts, including foregrips that mount under barrels, faux laser sights, collapsible stocks, and long-range barrel extenders. Certain battery-operated models are even capable of automatic fire, and some kids have figured out how to “bump fire” their nonautomatic models the same way you can bump fire a semiautomatic rifle: by hooking your finger around the trigger and moving the entire rifle back and forth.
Though there were lots of toy guns on the market that looked real when I was a kid, the opposite was not true: the only real guns I ever saw or handled were unmistakably not toys. They were made of black or polished steel and smooth, stained wood. (If they had plastic on them at all, it was black.) But just as Nerf seems to have co-opted the infinite accessorizing possibilities of the actual firearms industry, owners of AR-15s are sending their guns to third-party customizers to incorporate more playful features into their design: a gun can be anodized in virtually any color, or have a custom wrap applied featuring Star Wars and Marvel themes.
Growing up, my friends and I had toy-gun arsenals that would’ve equipped us for any conflict from the Revolutionary War to Vietnam: long-barreled muskets purchased on field trips to Colonial Williamsburg, chrome six-shooters, cork popguns and rubber-band shooters, and battery-operated squirt guns that looked like exact replicas of the TEC-9 and MAC-10. A company called Zap It sold guns shaped like miniature Uzis, which shot blood-colored ink that would stain clothes briefly, then quickly fade and disappear. (An ad from the late 1980s shows a kid popping out from behind a door to shoot the mailman. A few seconds later, his dad shoots him from behind the cover of the morning paper.)
The first toy gun I remember playing with was a chrome cap gun in the shape of a .45 pistol. I was so young I don’t even remember holding it for the first time, but it stayed in my toy bin well into my middle-school years. It had been my dad’s when he was a kid in the 1950s and had plastic grips with real stippling and fired caps from a roll, which meant there was real smoke. It smelled musty and oxidized, like everything else that came out of my Nana’s basement in Missouri—a smell I associated with a grandfather and great-uncles I had never known, who’d fought in the trenches of WWI and on the seas of the North Atlantic, in the Pacific, and across Europe in WWII.
I knew boys who weren’t allowed to play with toy guns at all. Our grandparents were part of the Greatest Generation, survivors of epic struggles that earned them awe and reverence bordering on fear. But we were the children of the Baby Boomers—a generation sent to fight in Vietnam, a confusing conflict with no clear objectives that killed and maimed young draftees by the tens of thousands. Many young people came out of the 1960s committed to breaking the cycle of macho violence by emphasizing nonviolent play at home. When they had kids of their own—my generation, somewhere between Gen Xers and millennials—they forbade backyard war games and the props they thought were necessary to play them.
These attempts were futile. Whenever I was at a friend’s house who wasn’t allowed to have toy guns, we used our fingers for pistols and sticks for rifles. We made machine-gun noises and explosions with our mouths, imagining bullets kicking up dust around the enemy fortifications, smoke and splintered timber rising skyward in theatrical columns of smoke.
by Elliott Woods, Topic | Read more:
Image: Greg Marinovich
