The Most Dangerous Toys of 2011

theodp writes "If you've procrastinated on your Xmas shopping this year, fear not: Gawker's just published its tongue-in-cheek 2011 Top Picks for Gifts That Maim or Poison Children. Until President Nixon enacted the first national safety standard for playthings with the Toy Safety Act in 1969, the toy industry was pretty much anything-goes. As a result of the legislation, children may live longer, but they'll never know the joys of many beloved-but-dangerous classics, including Zulu Guns, Jarts, and Clackers."

Comments

Want!

[ackthpt]

What sort of psychology are they playing at here?

When I was a wee lad we have to burn ourselves with Thing-makers, pinch fingers in gears of Erector sets and poison ourselves with Chemistry sets. Kids today have it much harder.

Re:Want!

[confused one]

I recall accidentally starting a fire in the kitchen with an old chemistry set. Pinched fingers. Injury due to hard objects striking the body. These were the norm. BB guns were considered toys (they are currently classified as firearms in the city I'm living in) I learned to operate lawn mowers, drive tractors, and handle chain saws by my early teen years. You learned to respect things. Kids today are taught to be scared of machines that are safer than "toys" we played with as kids.

Re:Want!

[Forbman]

'cept a .22 cal air-powered pellet gun that shoots pellets at 1100 fps might as well be a firearm.

Re:Want!

[hairyfeet]

Oh don't forget lawn darts, the "Hey lets throw sharp stakes at each other!" toy for the whole family, hell they even had a "Mr Atomic" chem set, I wonder if those kids glow in the dark now?

This reminds me of the old SNL bit, anybody remember Akroyd getting grief over his company's toys like "Johnny switchblade" or the "human torch" costume which was just some gas soaked rags and some matches?

But compared to the stuff we had when I was a kid the stuff on the list is a fricking joke! heck when I was a kid we all had minibikes starting as young as 5! Nobody wore helmets, everybody had ramps, the answer to every injury was "put a bandaid on it" and we all drove like maniacs! I can still remember buzzing around my small town at 8 with a giant 8 track duct taped to the handlebars so I could blast Kiss Alive II as I scared the neighbors dogs. We all had lawn darts and played with fireworks and yet we all managed to survive just fine!

I have to wonder if this isn't just "the march of the morons" at play here, as we at least had enough common sense not to do things REALLY stupid. Nowadays it seems like we are trying to babyproof the planet, are kids really THAT much stupider than when we were kids?

Re:Want!

[Pulzar]

'cept a .22 cal air-powered pellet gun that shoots pellets at 1100 fps might as well be a firearm

Everybody knows that a human eye can't perceive anything more than 60 fps. You need a pellet gun doing 1100 fps only because you have a small.... oh, wait, wrong thread?

Re:Want!

[sjames]

Or even harder, recognizing that some accidents are really freak events. They couldn't have been foreseen, probably won't happen again, and suggest no particular preventive action.

Re:Want!

[rev0lt]

You make me remember when I told my mum I was going to try some explosive recipes - and she replied very fast that if I want to do a mess and try explosives, to do it outside because she's not cleaning the kitchen.

Re:Want!

[hairyfeet]

I think you misunderstand dude, when I say "minibike" I mean with actual gasoline motors, goes about 50MPH. I actually didn't learn to ride a pedal bike until I was 11 because i always had a motorbike. my first bike was a Honda 50 minitrail at 5 years old! Everyone called it the mad bee for the sound that thing made, a high pitched 'meeeeeer' as i whiped through our little town (pop 350 on a good day). Lucky for mom we had a collie or she'd have never been able to get me home! She'd just stick her head out and tell the dog "Go fetch him for supper" and Ruffles would go flying after the sound and when he caught me he'd bark at me and head towards the house. Man I miss that dog, nothing like a really smart dog.

I agree though that parents go too damned far the other way. I had a little girl bump into me and the grocery store and when I said "excuse me little miss" I actually heard her momma say "stranger danger". Well needless to say I went off like an atom bomb on that mom and told her that if she and the other parents would be more worried about teaching their kids good manners instead of being afraid of invisible bogeymen the world would be a better place, all the people in the store cheered. Its sad things have gotten so stupid that when one of the children downstairs held the door open for me when I was loaded down and said "here you go sir" i actually went and knocked on his mom's door just to tell her what a polite and well mannered child she had.

Its just nuts, no wonder so many kids are fat and diabetic, their damned parents won't even let them go play anymore! We rode motorbikes, ran like wild injuns, did we get hurt? Hell yes, but what don't get you makes you stronger and gives you some killer stories to go with the scars, like the time I am sitting in an ER with a nice little puddle of blood in front of me where I did a faceplant at 60MPH thanks to a damned dog trying to bite my front wheel, and I'm sitting next to a kid that is holding the holes in his throat together where he popped over a field into a barb wire fence on a 3 wheeler, and we are both just laughing our asses off higher than kites because the ER doc took one look at the two of us and said "Look I know that has GOT to hurt but we had some kids flip a convertible and couple of them are missing limbs, so if I give you two a shot of morphine will you be alright?" We just looked at each other and stuck out our arms and were laughing like loons inside of 10 minutes, good stuff that morphine.

Kids today in their sterile little living spaces just don't know what fun is. My boys rode bikes (sadly their mother wouldn't let me get them the motor kind after my little face plant, I told her losing a few inches of skin builds character) and went swimming with the fishes in actual creeks, they had FUN dammit! It did them good too, as age may have finally got up with me and given me the family beer belly both boys are lean and trim and the oldest is constantly being asked out by the little campus cuties.

It's an arms race..

[PopeAlien]

They keep making safer toys we keep making more dangerous children.

toys with molten metal

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was a lad (50's/60's) we had a toy where you'd melt some metal (lead? or something with a low melting point anyway) in a little crucible over a burner and pour the result into a mold. It would cool and form a little metal soldier figure, whereupon you'd take the two sides of the mold apart and out it would fall.

I'm sure a few trips to the ER were caused somewhere or another due to this toy, but you know, I'd rather not lived in the kind of dumbed down idiot-proof world that comes from trying to save people from themselves. That's a surefire way to breed more idiots.

Re:toys with molten metal

[bill_mcgonigle]

I'm sure a few trips to the ER were caused somewhere or another due to this toy,

I totally burned the shit out of my thumb when I was a kid, by melting some glass with my dad's propane torch and generally being an idiot.

I did it again (to my palm) when I first bought a house and installed a boiler and had my hand directly under a solder joint (yeah, I way over-flowed that joint).

Hot molten shit hurts. A lot. I now have good plumbing gloves (never swung for the third strike after that). Besides learning to buy gloves, I'm now very aware of the dangers of being between the dangerous thing and the Earth's core. It would be great if we could give kids a big list of "don't do that" but humans seem to learn better from experience.

but you know, I'd rather not lived in the kind of dumbed down idiot-proof world that comes from trying to save people from themselves. That's a surefire way to breed more idiots.

Well, that is the point. Idiots are easy to control. When people are farmed as livestock for 'their' tax money, having rambunctious ones just decreases the profit per head. Best to keep them calm, dumb, and in front of reality TV.

One of the worst articles I've ever seen on /.

[NoisySplatter]

Many of the toys on this list aren't very dangerous. I'd go as far as saying that a pencil is more dangerous than every single one of them. I can't fathom why this article appeared on this website.

Lame

[oldmac31310]

I RTFA just to make sure it would be as lame as I expected. It is. The Gawker sites are just a horrible waste of space. Less of this crap please!

Re:Lame

[guruevi]

I agree, I RTFA, most of the stuff isn't even dangerous (as far as I consider dangerous) and some of the other stuff should (or is) recalled for being either badly constructed or using certain (what should be illegal) chemicals.

Trampoline - who never used a trampoline? Just because the lingo is lawyer-proof doesn't make it a bad toy.
Foam-shooting Bow - As with any shooting toys (Nerf comes to mind) kids should be thought how to use it well. I made freaking real bows by soaking hard wood tree branches in water, some rope and a couple of my mother's plant-straightening bamboo sticks as arrows. Yeah, I bruised and cut my fingers and hands several times either making the bow or shooting the arrow with it's sharp edges and it was inaccurate as shit but I didn't aim to kill anyone. Are kids really that stupid these days?
Plastic sword - Same as the bow or a baseball bat. You learn real quickly that these things hurt if you get hit yourself. Several wooden sword fights with my brother and other kids made that clear to me.
Very low stilts - How is that dangerous? You can fall and hit your head or twist your ankle but that's how kids learn. You want to tie them down to a chair so they'll die of boredom?
Shrinky dinks - What's dangerous about a heating chamber? Those things zapping anyone how exactly? Unless there's some really shoddy engineering and the wires are exposed inside I don't understand. A halogen light bulb is hot. I touched one before. A stove exhaust pipe is hot, found out when standing too close to it trying to heat up in winter.
Playmobil - Make it illegal with huge fines to make products with such chemicals intended for kids. Not slap-of-the-wrist pay this $500k settlement so everyone gets a $1 coupon on their next purchase but "the families affected will own 30% of your company if you fuck up".
Swiss army weapon - You're a moron. Couldn't find anything dangerous after 4?

Conkers

[sqldr]

Probably not so popular on the other side of the atlantic, but here in Britain, every october is conker season, where we attach horse chessnuts (invariably hardened by baking, soaking in vinegar, hand cream, galvanisation, you name it) to string, then smash them into an opponent's conker (or your own elbow if you miss) until one shatters into many pieces. If you drop it, you have to try to pick it up while your opponent repeatedly stamps on it. Joy and safety goggles all round!

Little Clara Cadmium

[istartedi]

New! From China, it's little Clara Cadmium. Lick her tummy and hear her giggle. Feed her led pellets and watch her gain weight. Realistic BPA-based skin is soft to the touch. Just $9.99. Turn the price upside down and learn little Clara's secret.

Surviving lawn darts

[perpenso]

To think, not so long ago, my siblings and I were all lobbing lawn darts at each other, yet we all lived and didn't even lose an eye.

Of course only those of us nimble enough to dodge are here to make and read these lawn dart posts. :-)

Re:Surviving lawn darts

[hey!]

Someone will have to pry my Jarts out of my cold dead hands.

HAHAHA! Oh, wait. That was intended to ironic, wasn't it?