Toy gun encourages kids to stick barrel in mouth

This unfortunate toy gun has a whistle on the end of the barrel. Here's a video and more photos of the Mystery Gun Suicide Whistle. (Thanks, Darryl!)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Darryl

Thanks for posting this — the main reason I was sending it was because I couldn’t figure out what song the toy played, and thanks to BB, I now know (or was reminded) that it’s Lambada (“The Forbidden Dance!), by Kaoma, a hit back in 1989. But hey, now everybody knows that I let my son stick a gun/whistle in his mouth. It’s ok, I’m going to go recycle it now. Strange for a presumably Chinese toy, it has an international (?) recycling symbol on it as well as the “Do not throw this in the trash” symbol. I’ll put a photo of that up too soon.

–Darryl
Anonymous

who cares? this is only a problem if you live in a society that is so blinkered about firearms and in an environment where familiarity has resulted in a such a blase attitude that they are able to be got at by children.

Hell I have a catch on the kitchen cupboard that stops children getting to bleach how stupid must you be that you can let a child get hold of a real gun or be in an environment where kids and guns are left together unsupervised long enough for the former to put the latter in their mouth?

maybe there should be a darwin award section for people who manage to erase themselves from the gene pool after they have procreated?
mcanderson

By chance, I was watching some classic episodes of the Office last night and Michael has this toy gun on his desk. Check out the basketball episode from season 1, 2:25 into the episode, sure enough, there’s the gun!
Clay

Isn’t that the legendary Gun of Baseball?

(More on BB about the GoB: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/06/13/weird-toy-gun-of-bas.html )
deusdiabolus

I foresee the post photo ending up as a default icon for many a Livejournal.
lovelylushlisa

Can anybody tell me the actual name of this toy please?
Darryl

Hey Clay — turns out this is the Gun of Basketball variant. Here’s a link to a wider shot of the gun in action, with the spinning top visible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoQ_Qi0KKWc

I hadn’t heard of the Gun of Baseball before. Funny.
nick

Whistles don’t kill people. Kids kill people.
magnus

as a child (1970s) i had a pez gun that shot pez-candy in your mouth … don’t know if they still make those though
Mary Dell

Magnus, they don’t make that PEZ gun any more, but it’s really cool! My friend’s a collector and has one. What makes it really excellent is that not only does it teach children to play with real guns, it also can injure and choke kids all by itself.

I don’t think they make bubblegum cigarettes any more either.
Anonymous

You already blogged about this when it was called “The Gun of Baseball”. http://www.boingboing.net/2007/06/13/weird-toy-gun-of-bas.html
Anonymous

Clearly this is just a way to get kids accustomed to summoning their Personae during the Dark Hour.
danhawkeye

It’s pretty clear that there’s some giant factory in China with 30,000 red plastic toy handguns that needed to be put to some kind of use!
Zan

A local ice-cream truck near me still sells bubblegum cigarettes, although they are made in Mexico and the packaging is entirely in Spanish.
MajorD

Oh for heaven’s sake! I was trying for extreme, over-the-top, no-one-would-ever-actually-do-THAT satire when
I wrote about this just after the Reagan era. It’s like a kind of Moore’s Law of depravity: yesterday’s satire is tomorrow’s horrible headline.
Anonymous

There’s also the Kaba Kick, a more recent Japanese toy gun/russian roulette game for kids – with bullets in the shape of pink hippos.