Who invented these things? Who could have possibly thought it would be a good idea to market “foam bullets that don’t hurt when you’re hit” to boys of all ages, even when they have a whole head of gray hair or no hair at all? Who made those first sketches for this amazing invention of “won’t-hurt-them” guns and assured their marketing department that they were safe for the wild at heart who have always, deep down, wanted to engage in battle without anyone getting hurt.
Bull. These things DO hurt.
I know, because every time my boys find one of the guns hidden away in our garage and succeed in scaling a refrigerator or antique cabinet (impressively) to get it down, and, somehow, find all the bullets we’ve thrown away and the trash man has already picked up (I think they multiply in the dark of the garage), the first thing they do is point it at me. After which time they’ll then point it at each other. There is always someone crying in my house because of these things. Usually me.
There was a Christmas when someone thought it would be a good idea to buy my boys Nerf guns. A whole house of boys warrants this kind of thing, after all. And at first we were, like, Oh, yeah, cool, they can have battles in the backyard and no one gets hurt, because the bullets are soft and they won’t aim at each other’s heads or use the guns as swords instead. Except they don’t want to have battles in the backyard, and the bullets aren’t soft, and when they run out of bullets, they sword fight with hard plastic instead. The only time it’s even fun to play with these things is when I can wrestle a gun away from one of the boys and turn it on them (“YOU SEE? YOU SEE HOW IT FEELS? QUIT SHOOTING MY BUTT!”).
Here’s all I know. Most of the time, I’m minding my own business, trying to get dinner started or something responsible like that, and a boy creeps up behind me, and the only warning I have is the “whoosh” of the bullet coming. I don’t even have time to get out of the way before my left flank goes completely numb.
So I’m just here to tell you that these Nerf guns? Save your sanity and your money. If I had to slap a warning label on one of these things, this is what it would say:
“Don’t even think about it. Believe me, you do NOT want one of these things even close to your house. Your children will use it to attack you and terrorize their brothers and make little circle rings on every glass surface, and God knows you already have enough of all that without these yellow plastic torture devices waving in your kids’ can’t-really-aim hands. You will regret it every single hour of every single day. Check out those foam swords on aisle 25 instead.
“On second thought, just go straight to the wine aisle and don’t forget some chocolate, because you deserve it!”
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
