Pretending To Shoot People
I hope you brought yer tickets to the GUN SHOW~!!1
written by Mike originally for Poprocks & Coke on May 19, 2025

The hardest part about writing, for me at least, is the opening paragraph. After sitting here for quite some time, trying to figure out the best way to start this thing, it dawned on me that the subject of guns & violence has become a very touchy one. A far stretch from when I was a wee lad, pretending to take on the entire Viet Cong army in my backyard. Maybe this is why the Iraqi regime fell so quickly. Maybe it's because the troops that were sent over were part of my generation, the go get 'em, G.I. Joe generation. A generation told that violence may not be the answer to all of life's problems, but it sure works well with terrorist organizations.

With that, it's time to take a testosterone-fueled trip back to my childhood for a look at some of the most memorable plastic firearms from both before AND after the infamous Toy Gun Act of 198X.

The Toy Gun Act of 198X basically says that a toy gun has to look like a TOY gun. In other words, every toy gun made from that point on had to look unmistakably like it was a toy, so as not to be mistaken for a real gun. Why would Congress pass such a law? Well, let's put it in perspective. Imagine you're going to rob a bank. Your weapon of choice? Megatron.

Yes, Megatron. In his gun form, of course. Despite what you might have heard, trying to hold up a bank using Megatron in his regular robot form won't get you very far. Now, assuming the bank tellers have as much knowledge about guns that I do, which is not much more than that they're used to shoot things, transformed Megatron looks like a real, honest to goodness handgun, save for the Decepticon logos. But consider this: you & I both see that logo & immediately think, "This is a Transformers toy." Your average, middle aged bank tellers, however, aren't going to recognize it as such. They don't know who Megatron is. They don't watch Transformers. For all they know, you're holding a gun with a weird purple sticker on it up to their face, & they'll do whatever it takes to get it away from their face.

You wouldn't even think of trying to rob a bank with the Nintendo Zapper light gun, now would you? Of course not, because you know that everybody would laugh in your face. Just look at it. It doesn't look real at all. It's bright freaking orange! The only time anybody should ever be afraid of someone threatening to shoot them with a bright orange gun is if the person appears to be from the future & is wearing a matching metallic suit, or if the person is Captain N.

But wait! Take a look at the original grey Zapper gun. Actually, imagine being threatened by someone pointing the original grey Zapper gun in your face. Don't tell me you wouldn't be scared to death. This original version of the Zapper has a chilling, realistic look to it, & I don't think anybody would want to have to stare down the dark, cold barrel of that thing for very long. Now you see the importance of the Toy Gun Act of 198X.

At this point I'd just like to remind you that I do NOT condone bank robbing with real OR toy guns. Remember, the name of this post is PRETENDING To Shoot People. Actually shooting or threatening to shoot people is not nice. Unless, you know, they break into your house or kidnap a princess or something. I figured I'd better add that, because after all the emails I'm STILL getting from idiots who thought I was serious when I said that Hot Topic was the punkest store ever, I don't need any more. So please, read between the lines or I'll shoot you in the face.

Where was I? Oh yes, the Zapper. No matter what color you had, using it to play Duck Hunt & missing most of the ducks & having your stupid dog laugh at you & trying to shoot your stupid dog in the face & missing the next round of ducks because you were too busy trying to shoot your stupid dog in the face was only fun for so long. But after you turned the game off, you still had a cool toy gun to play with. Captain N made the Zapper look awesome, & we all wanted to be like him & become the game. What I'm trying to say is, I hope I'm not the only kid who would wrap the Zapper cord around my arm to get it out of the way & use the gun to pretend to shoot at invisible soldiers of evil lurking in my living room.

Then there was the end all, be all toy guns of my generation. They all had the same name on them... the name of a man that no one, no law, no war could stop...

Rambo's entire weapons arsenal was available at Toys 'R Us, & every respectable male child of the '80s had at least one item with Rambo's name on it. My brother & I had a few Rambo guns & knives, but our pride & joy was the Rambo water gun, which we rarely actually filled it up with water. It was a big huge machine gun, so most of the time we just used it as one, supplying the sound effects with our mouths. I wish I still had it to show you, but alas, it was among the many things my mom generously donated to the Purple Heart foundation when I went off to college, so now it probably belongs to some poor kid in Camden who has no idea who Rambo is.

My brother & I had a whole lot of toy guns & ammo, some of which carried the Rambo name, & the rest of which were hand-me-down clothes from a neighbor of ours who fought in World War II. We had enough plastic grenades & wooden machine guns to take on a small country. Our battles, however, wasn't limited to the jungles of Vietnam or the deserts of wherever it is that Cobra happens to call home. Every once in a while, we'd decide to take our battles to the Old West. Sometimes we'd play Cowboys & Indians, but since I think my brother had one bow & arrow set & a tomahawk, & that was about it for our set of Indian gear, we'd mostly just play Cowboys & Other Cowboys. Which brings me to my next entry into the Mike Fireball Toy Gun Show, the generic cowboy cap gun.

This chromed-over classic was meant to be a cap gun, but more often than not we just clicked away on the trigger without the caps. Eventually, the part of the gun that's supposed to be the bullet chamber would come loose & hang off the edge of the gun, & then nobody would want to play stupid Cowboys anymore.

There was a reason we rarely used caps in the cowboy cap gun. Why use them in the cowboy cap gun, when you could use them in the big huge cap RIFLE?!

There was some inexplicable joy that surrounded the simple process of loading a cap into a wooden rifle & hearing that loud shot ring out for the 5 houses in the immediate vicinity to hear. Santa Claus would fill our stockings with caps & candy cigarettes, treating us like the men we were.

I don't want to give the impression that toy guns were only fun to play with before the Toy Gun Act of 198X, when they looked realistic. Wait... actually, now that I think about it, it's probably true, & I don't think I'll be able to convince anyone otherwise. Still, there were a quite a few toy guns that left a big enough impression on me to wish to include them in my arsenal if I ever decided to take on an entire army of terrorists by myself.

Aside from my awesome Rambo water machine gun & a few others like it, water pistols were generally small, brightly colored plastic squirt guns that had to be refilled once every 5 minutes. This was a big pain to do... until one summer, the mother of all water guns was released.

The Super Soaker 50. This was the first in a long line of Super Soakers, which has now become the first name in water guns. It was released in 1988 as the "Power Drencher" & introduced the revolutionary air pressure pump system, which is now pretty much a standard feature in water guns. Not only could it hold a lot of water, but you got a constant spray out of it that could reach a target up to 50 feet away!

Of course, not only did 50 feet seem like a much longer distance on TV than it did in real life, but there was also the fact that reaching a target 50 feet away required pumping the living crap out of the thing, at which point your arm would be all tired, & then your aiming accuracy suffers. So normally we'd just settle for hitting someone 30 feet away.

After Super Soaker made a name for itself, it started introducing guns with extra water canisters & even backpacks. The extra storage was nice, but it was also heavy for a little kid, so as far as I'm concerned, the original model is still among the best of them.

While I'm on the subject of water guns, there was another one called Zap-It!, a gun so totally awesome, that its picture could not be found anywhere on the internet. Zap-It! worked a lot like the Rambo machine gun, but instead of filling it with water, you filled it with colored disappearing ink. I've never met anybody who actually had a Zap-It!, but everybody wanted one. Our clever moms would just offer to give us food coloring & let us fill our guns with that instead, but we just couldn't settle for some lame, makeshift Zap-It! wannabe. If we couldn't have the real thing, then it just wasn't worth the trouble.

And speaking of disappearing things reminds me of ghosts, so for my next piece I present...

The Ghost Popper. This was apparently part of the Real Ghostbusters' weapons arsenal, but I don't recall them ever using it on the show. But hey, I didn't complain when it showed up under the Christmas Tree. I figured that anything that the Ghostbusters liked enough to put their logo on the side of it has to be pretty awesome.

The Ghost Popper was sort of a little cannon that shot yellow foam cylinders. It came with 4 of them, & while it might have been fun to pretend to shoot ghosts with the Ghost Popper, it was about 100 times more fun to actually shoot real, non-dead people with Ghost Popper. If you had two of them, you could be on either side of a room, hiding behind couches or tables or whatever, & have Ghost Popper wars with each other. Sort of like the Assault on American Gladiators, only without Laser. And speaking of Laser, behold my final entry of the day...

The Lazer Tag gun. No, I'm not spelling that wrong. They spelled Lazer with a Z, & that's actually how I thought the word was spelled for years. The whole Lazer Tag package, including the stupid helmet & sensors & vest & crap, was fun for about 10 seconds. The only reason I even had one was because they had Lazer Tag both at the mall & on the boardwalk, & I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

The thing, though, was that at the mall & on the boardwalk, it WAS the coolest thing ever. The home version was lame in comparison, as I should have expected. Photon was far better in comparison, but at least Lazer Tag came with a sweet looking gun. So I'd just use the Lazer Tag gun when I was playing Army with my friends. Sure, I may have looked out of place with my Lazer Tag gun, while all my other friends had camouflage rifles & machine guns, but I didn't care. I'd just make up some story about how I was somebody's long lost relative from the future. Then again, that was my excuse for everything. "It's ok, because I'm from the future!"

That's enough for now, I suppose. There are some more I could talk about, but I'd really like to get this post up. It took a while in the making, because I've been very busy finishing up school forever, & whether you agree with me or not, I think that's a little more important than talking about toy guns that I don't own anymore on my stupid website. So until next time, be excellent to each other, or I'll shoot you in the face.