Back in the day, LEGO blocks were blocks. In fact, they were called LEGO blocks. Anything you built with them was . . . blocky. These days, LEGO has more types of plastic pieces than Denmark has attractive women. And yet the Danes have to work hard to get kids to think outside the blocks. I mean box. To build things that aren’t described in the directions. Wasn’t that the point of the LEGO movie? Anyway, LEGO guns looked stupid. Now, they don’t. Well, not to a kid. Then again, this ex-kid grew up shooting plastic and die-cast guns that looked and sounded like real guns. OK, not Airsoft quality, but way more realistic than NERF guns. Lever guns! Cap guns! Six-shooters! Machine guns! Rifles! (Shotguns? Not so much.) I haven’t seen that kind of toy in decades. What toy guns did you play with as a kid? What toy guns do your kids play with?

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108 COMMENTS

  1. With two young sons, I’ve built up quite the Nerf arsenal for the three of us. The guns may not look a lot like the “real” thing (although some do have a very AR look to them), I’d have killed for their capabilities back when I was a kid. There’s something about sliding another 18 round dart magazine into a dart gun to fling foam darts accurately at someone 30 feet away that leaves my childhood in the dust. And the fun it creates with my boys (who generally team up to take Daddy down) are beyond value.

    • Of course, the downside is having to walk the yard in search of over 100 darts that may have flown up to 40 feet past your target so the next round of mayhem can begin…

    • +1 for Nerf.

      A friend once stopped by to show me his recent M4 purchase – so we compared the M4 to a comparable Nerf model. An amazing number of cosmetic details matched up. One disappointment: Nerf rails aren’t of standard size, so accessories can’t be swapped. The spiffy Nerf sight would have looked cool on the M4…

      • I’ve got a standard NERF gun that looks somewhat like an AR, but I’ve modified it a bit. I made a wooden solid stock for it, and cobbled together a bipod from the shaft of an aluminium brush. The gun has a slide on top but no charging handle, so I added a permanent one on the right side and a folding one (spring loaded) on the left. Yes, my NERF gun is coveted. Sad, I know but it’s the closest thing to a real gun I’ve got.

  2. The two I remember best were a “Shoot-’em-Shell derringer and a wonderful, full size and weight 1911 cap gun. You actually pulled the slide back to load caps.

    The most fun, though, were the ball bearing and firecracker cannons built of plumbing pipe, and the occasional .22 short zip gun.

    Honorable mention to the giant slingshot my friends and I built of old bicycle inner tubes and a conveniently shaped crook in a tree. You could shoot a half brick a hundred yards with that thing.

    God, we had so much freedom in the fifties!

  3. I had a couple of Hubley Texans and a Long Tom and a Stallion 45 that used “cartridges” that each contained a cap. I also had a Daisy Golden Eagle BB gun, and a bipod mounted machine gun that made passably realistic noises when you turned a crank.

    • I’d completely forgotten the crank operated “machine gun” that I had mounted on the handlebars of my bike. They used to advertise them on the back page of comic books.

  4. Once my grandmother gave me a big plastic bag full of all kinds of toy pistols, cowboy guns, “flintlocks”, police guns (I specifically recall a “Colt Highway Trooper”)–I don’t know where she got them, I think my granddad who worked for the city got them. Anyway, they lasted us for years. One of my favorites was a non-functional BB gun, lever-action but otherwise looked very military with its heavy wooden stock and forend and leather sling. Just about the time we were outgrowing “playing Army”, a cousin got my brother and me replica M2’s–just a bit late for us to get full use of them.

    • Oh, almost forgot my favorite–maybe 2nd or 3rd grade, for my birthday I got a toy M14 that “ratatated” when you pulled trigger. Best weapon on the block at the time!

      • I had an Uzi that did the same thing, I loved it. You pulled the “charging handle” and then pull the tigger and it went ratatatatatata.

    • She could have gone to a yard sale. A few years back I sold my entire childhood arsenal (arsenal by our terms, not the media) to an elderly gentleman for about $20.

  5. Mine was a Mattel Thompson submachinegun. It had a bolt I could pull back, which would ratchet forward and make a noise like a submachinegun, when I pulled the trigger and held it down.

    • I had one of those and enough cap guns (revolvers and rifles) that the NY times would say I had “an arsenal” of course that was back in the early ’70’s when you were the odd ball if you didn’t have a cap gun

    • I had one too ! Mine was in green camo. My friend had a drill-team Springfield, and we would hide out in a vacant lot and refight W.W. II.

    • My God did I love those Mattel “Tommy Guns! I think I had two or three of then over the years. I always broke the front of the magazine (The door to load the roll of caps) and the barrel right in front of the fore grip. I guess I was trying a little too hard to emulate Sgt. Saunders!

  6. Aside from various cheap cap guns, I had a nifty “Thompson” made from wood and metal tubing by my Granddad. My primo gun was a Nichols Ranch Stallion .45 Mark II Six-Shooter, which came in a cardboard hinge-lid box with two sets of grips (black and white), a “cartridge belt” to hold the 6 cartridges, and the Colt-SAA lookalike revolver. I have a B&W photo of me at age 5 or so, holding it in my right hand (with my finger outside the trigger guard).

    I still have that same cap gun, in the box, with all of the accoutrements, in working condition.

    Can you say “gun nut creds”, boys and girls? Hey, some of us were born with an instinct for collecting stuff, what can I say?

    And let’s not forget the golf ball mortars, made from a piece of steel pipe and a cherry bomb or M-80.

    • I also had 2 of the Nichols “45” Colt six shooters with the individual cartridge cap shooters. One was a long barreled Black Plastic grips that I carried in the “Calvary Draw” position on my left hip. The other was the short barrel/white grips, carried on right hip, regular right hand draw position. Since I did not have a two holster set, I wore one right side holster backwards, on my left side. Lotta fun I had with those two! When I retired in 2011, I found a gun dealer who had Heritage, American made single action revolvers. I bought 2 of them, one with a 6 inch barrel, on which I installed a set of dark grips, and a 3 inch barrel with white grips. I carry them the same way I carried those Nichols cap guns. The real ones are the 22 LR/22Mag combos, so I have 2 in 1 guns now, reflecting those Nichols Pair of the 1950’s!

  7. After I graduated from y-shaped sticks, I had a cap gun replica of a Colt SSA from Walmart. And, of course, Megatron from Transformers, a robot which turned into a Walther PPK.

      • A P-38 with a scope, buttstock, and barrel extension. While the pistol turned into the robot, the accessories combined to form a really cool tripod-mounted laser cannon he could stand behind. Pretty sure the “gun mode” was modeled after a gun from “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”…

    • i had a Megatron too. I also had Shockwave which transformed into a futuristic pistol. These were both Generation 1 toys.

  8. some nerd and squirt guns, then cap six shooters, then it became airsoft so i “played” with everything from k98s and revolvers to m24s and SAWs, oh and humvees, APCs, peas grenades and simbangs.

  9. Pair of flashy chrome-plated Lone Ranger SAA cap guns with faux ivory grips and matching holster set. The distance of the memories may have rose-colored them somewhat, but I remember those things being so heavy and solid you could have pistol-whipped someone with them pretty effectively.

    • I had one of these! Great toy. To my young hand it DID feel solid–metal, not like plastic toy guns. Today a kid would probably get shot for “shooting” one of those in his back yard.

  12. Before I was school age, I had a cap gun that looked like a blue steel .38 snubby. One day my uncle stopped by. I was playing in the livingroom and my grandmother was busy in the kitchen. My uncle saw the cap gun on the coffee table, picked it up and, convinced it was real, hollered, “Why have you left this out where Stu can reach it?” We both laughed. Yes, the gun looked that real.

    When I was about 8 or 9, “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” premiered and I had to have ALL the toys, many of which were guns. I went to school wearing my official shoulder holster with the plastic Walther with the strange flash hider on the tip. (And spent a lot of time talking to my pen.) But the BEST toy, and the most politically incorrect one by today’s standards, was the UNCLE table lighter. And it did look exactly like one of those large table lighters that used to decorate coffee and boardroom tables all across America back in the ’60s. This one had a spy-style surprise, though. First, it opened like a book, revealing it to double as a cigarette case! But the cigarettes were actually a plastic inner door that swung open to reveal a secret 2-way radio. But the best part: press the lighter button and the front opened up, a barrel popped out and it went “BANG!” Yes, it was also a cap gun. See it here:
    http://calvinscanadiancaveofcool.blogspot.com/2013/06/man-from-uncle-cigarette-lighter-radio.html

    You’ll never see anything like that again.

    • Stu – Sounds like my Wasp brand Wasp “.38 snub-nose revolver”. The “wheel” could be turned out and you’d insert a ring of plastic caps arranged in a circle, then twist your wrist, and smack it back in, just like they did on all the cop shows of the 60’s. Not like the regular paper strip cap guns.

  13. I had a lot of different toy guns growing up. Especially surprising with an antigun mom

  14. Henry rifle shootin’ paper caps — what I asked for when I was 5. When I was 12 I saved up $6.00 to buy a plastic cap-shootin’ Detective Special out of the locked case at KayBee. Kiddo has a Kentucky rifle from Colonial Williamsburg which ignites plastic caps on a nipple — looks like standard percussion caps will fit there too!

  16. The real question is what toy guns didn’t I play as a kid. I’m sure there are nerf darts scattered around the neighborhood still.

  17. My parents were perhaps a bit overzealous about the “guns are not toys” thing… so if I had a toy that looked like a gun it was usually bright colored plastic or extraterrestrial. Had a Nerf bow and arrow, and entire arsenal of super soakers. When we got older the boys in the neighborhood modified the nerf darts by melting thumbtacks into the tips, felt like a red wasp sting but generally did no harm, you couldn’t do that today. I grew up in a neighborhood with 4 other families with kids my age so we would have Nerf and super soaker battles all the time. The closest I ever got to looking like a real gun were the little saturday night special snubnose revolver cap guns we could get at the drugstore walking distance from the house for like $1.50, and I had a benjamin air rifle when I got older. That was most definitely not a toy, and I knew it.

    Now days, I think I take a similar line to my parents. I always let my son be present, once I have put any unspent ammo in a security cabinet and checked thoroughly that there are no live rounds, when I’m cleaning the rifle/pistol after the range. He knows not to touch the trigger, and he has a pop-gun rifle and walks around and tells everyone he is only allowed to shoot targets and animals (he says deers) with… not people. Even at a young age he is such a sponge so I have just tried to give him lessons every time I get the guns out. No matter where he is in the house he comes running when he hears the “kathunk” of the bolts opening on the safe in my closet when Im in there, so I just use that as a teaching opportunity, let im carry around my ear muffs or empty range bags, and let him see the guns, and learn not to touch and show him how I always check them and keep them pointed in a safe direction. I wont propbably draw the hard and fast line my parents drew, but I have always been very wary of the “toy” guns kids have today. I really disagree with giving them access to an airsoft pistol that looks, feels, weighs as much as, and cycles like a legitimate Berreta 92 or glock or 1911. While I agree it is my job to teach him, but I cringe when I see the vast majority of kids with airsoft guns who have sharpied the orange tips black or silver. Its just not worth the risk that one day in a lapse of judgment he although Im really way more concerned that one of his friends will find a gun and not knowing better pull the trigger and it goes boom as opposed to pffffttt like they were expecting.

    There needs to be enough of a line between the toy and the real deal so there is no mistaking. I think if you want to get your kid involved at a young age a red rider or even a benjamin or similar air rifle to play with under close supervision is way better way to teach them to enjoy but be safe. I wasnt allowed to shoot pidgeons and squirrels when I got my air rifle, but one time mom was out of the house and I did anyways, and afterwards I felt positively sick, Just like the article yesterday about the dad that shot the jug of water in front of his kid (my dad did that to me too), you want to make sure from as young of an age as is reasonable that your children understand very clearly that dead animals dont get to hit reset and start the level over again, and that guns only tools, but are owed respect and care, just like the drill/hammer/circular saw etc in the garage.

    • My wife actually tried that “space guns that won’t look real” thing with our boys, it didn’t last long. They were winning 4-H shooting medals by the time they were 14 or so.

  18. Little of everything. Loved my cap guns and sticks that are vaguely shaped like guns and lego guns not even close to guns and lego swords that were AWEsome.

    Oh and Dad eventually got me a break action pellet gun. THAT was super fun.

    • I had the Johnny Seven, the Man from UNCLE brief case gun and camera and the Mattel M16 but no way in hell was I going to have a BB gun or 22. Not in the house I grew up in. Kinda weird in retrospect.

      • I guess back then people could tell the difference between toys and the real thing. They knew that breakfast pastries didn’t become lethal weapons by chewing them into funny shapes too.

  20. I don’t recall what brand they were, but I had quite a collection of very realistic cap guns that used caps that came on a plastic strip. The guns had magazines into which the cap strip was inserted, and spent caps were cut from the strip and ejected, like real brass. So cool. Anybody remember those, and who made them? I had a bunch of pistols and one incredibly cool “sniper rifle”… Ah, nostalgia…

    • I had a PPK cap gun just like that. strip of plastic caps was magazine fed and ejected out of the top. Probably my favorite toy gun of all time.

    • My next door neighbor, and best friend, growing up had a 12 shot revolver cap gun where you could insert a ~20 caliber plastic pellet into the front end of the cylinder and it would be propelled out of the barrel by the expanding gases when the cap was fired. Realize this was at least a decade before even the cheesiest airsoft guns existed. It was impressive, if not a little scary.

    • Ah, yes! Had one that looked like a Desert Eagle. Except that it was painted turquoise and the feed strip kept jamming. Took 20 min with mom’s nail file to get my toy gun to feed. It made me the most badass 9 year old on the block.

      Totally worth it.

  21. I had a couple of Beretta 92 squirt guns that were my go-to sidearms back in grade school. I should probably pick a real one up here at some point. That’d be kinda nice.

  22. Cap guns, of course.
    We also had some early type of airsoft pistols (little yellow BBs that must have gotten all of 50 FPS, lol). And a “decommisioned” air lever gun (I don’t remember every having ammo for it. We just used to give it a few pumps, pull the trigger and get a LOUD boom out of it).

    The best, though, were our homemade crossbows/zip guns: A couple of pieces of wood, some “U” nails, extra-thick rubber bands and soda can tabs. Those suckers really stung!

    • I had a bunch of those guns that shot the little yellow rubber BBs. Most were the standard Whitney Wolverine replica ones, but I had a pump shotgun, too. There’s a direct line of causation between shooting those at each other and our later BB gun wars with real Daisy and Crosman guns…

  23. +1 Kent. 50years ago I got the same Mattel machine gun for Christmas. My brother got the snub nose(very realistic) Mattel revolver. It would get you SHOT now if you pulled it out. I always coveted my brother snubbie even though the machine gun was really cool. BTW when I was a kid everyone in the neighborhood played war and as far as I know nobody turned into a violent serial killer. Sad how the world is SO f###ed up now.

  24. The coolest toy gun I ever had was given to me by my uncle in the late 80’s/early 90’s for Christmas. He got me & my brother these outrageously real looking MP5s that had detachable magazines, canvas slings, colored in pictograms, etc.

    They came with dark green plastic shell casings that had a hole in the end to load small white plastic BBs. Once you loaded those up, you could load the completed cartridges into the mags and blast away. After you fired one, you would pull back the handle which would eject the case & load a fresh one in from the magazine. Waaay cool.

  25. Had a metal Colt 1911 with USMC lettered on it – with three uncles in the USMC what else? But I really wanted my buddy’s toy Thompson with the drum mag … sold under the name of “Thunder Burp”, if failing neurons aren’t joshing me…..

  26. The first I can remember was a set of paper roll cap SAAs complete with a plastic dual rig holster(4yo). Then I received an M-16(not sure manufacturer) that made mechanically simulated sounds when you pulled the trigger(6yo). After a visit to Universal Studios, I got ahold of an “A-Team” Uzi/1911 combo(8) and finally, later, I had a Edison Giocattoli Falconmatic supermatic strip pistol(10). by then I was already learning how to safely handle firearms and transitioned to BB guns and eventually, firearms. I miss that Falconmatic though.

  27. I had rubber bullet pistols, a couple cap gun revolvers, lego guns I built that fired axles, and of course the perfunctory slingshot.

    • Yes! These were incredible water guns. Not as much water as super-soaker. But they looked awesome. Remember the RPG-7 water gun? I had a 1911 intertec that you had to rack the slide every time to shoot

  30. haha… there were no nurfs or transformers when I was a kid. I had cap guns with rolls of paper caps but by the time I was 9 or 10 I had a daisy bb gun. By 15 I moved up to a Sheridan Blue Streak pellet gun…which I still have and still use from time to time.

  31. I had a Mattel lever action rifle and a cool chromed Mattel Peacemaker replica. Both used plastic, spring-loaded Shootem’ Shells that you affixed a self-adhesive Greenie Stick ’em Cap to. Got a nice bang and launched a hard-plastic projectile.

    Had various other guns that took roll caps. One of my favorites was a Mauser military replica in kid size.

    Never owned a BB gun – but lived on a farm and Dad bought me a Savage/Steven .22 single shot when I was 6.

  32. Montgomery Ward, cased 1911 which shot plastic bullets, round caps on the back of the case made a nice BANG and the M1 Garand which has the same real look and shot plastic .30 cal. I whish I still had these. The Red Ryder B gun, a cast Colt Detective which you could not tell from a real item. Several single six cap guns. I don’t know how many rolls of caps I used but I usually wore out a cap gun every 3-4 months. I had a lot of fun! Later I had the Crosman co2 bb pistol and the Benjamin pump action pellet rifle. I was finally given a Luger copy co2 single shot .22 cal pellet pistol which was fun and accurate. I’d like to find another one of those.

  33. The venerable Red ryder. We used to duel with them at 10 paces. Only rules: body shots only, not the face! In retrospect, we were a bit undersupervised in those days.

  34. What were my toy guns as a child? Sticks (especially anything that resembled a pistol grip and barrel) and of course my own hand with my index finger as the barrel and my thumb as the hammer for quite a long time. I eventually acquired a double action revolver cap gun at some point. And I vaguely remember a plastic handgun that must have been modeled after a semi-auto something.

  35. Aluminum crutches.

    I’d buy a shitty made-in-china M4 at the state fair every year.

  36. I had too many Nerf guns to count, a couple of 1911s that shot suction cup darts, and SAA and DA revolver cap guns.

  37. I had the typical lever action “POP” guns, plastic revolvers and cowboy type cap guns, but my claim to fame as a kid was my grandfather’s work. Being a woodcarver, whenever my brother and I wanted toys, he made them. I had a 30 caliber machine gun, an M16 (with wooden knife sheathed on the stock and a magazine that did double duty as a radio), a pair of camo field glasses (That were so well camouflaged we lost them in the bushes until winter), and the coup de grace, a “working” grenade! It was bored out in the center with a plastic (detergent bottle) top that would pop open on impact. Fill it with dust or powder paint and give it a toss and you get a big dust cloud when it hits! Great times!

  38. Yeah I had one of those Mattel Tommy guns and just about every kind of military replica firearm I could find. Was really into playing army as a kid, wanted nothing to do with cowboys or cops and robbers. The one I wish I’d kept was a Springfield 03 replica (or close to it) that was made with real wood and steel and was heavy and pretty well made for a toy gun. My brother and I got one each for Christmas way back in’65. Anybody remember those? The bolt would roll back and cock like the real thing. And I recall my Dad saying the damn things cost all most as much as a real one. But we beat ’em up, this was war you know, and they just got thrown out like so many other old toys. Pity. If we only knew then what we know know, huh?

  39. When I was a kid, way the hell back a long time ago, I remember a cap pistol I had. It had a revolving cylinder, and the “caps” were on a cylindrical backing with 6 caps placed around the perimeter. Does anybody remember those kind? They worked a lot better than the regular type of caps that came in a roll.

    • They were called “disc caps,” and I did have at least one cap gun that fired them. I can’t recall what the gun was called.

  40. I have no airsoft, cap or otherwise projectile-firing weapons aside from my NERF guns. I have been badgering my mother for one for the past three years, but as of yet no luck. I do have a non-firing model of the Beretta 92FS, with a working slide and trigger but no working mag, safety, slidestop, takedown or anything of the sort.

  42. I had the standard roll cap gun, but found it more fun to take the whole roll of 50 caps and hit it with the sledge hammer. POW!!!!!

    • I’ll bet that now your grown, you like to take a box of primers and hit them with a sledge hammer.
      BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

          • My office opens onto a fab shop – machining on one side, and welding on the other. Right on the other side of my office wall are almost a dozen high-pressure gas cylinders, mostly O2 for welding and Ar and He for TIG and MIG welding, and a couple of small, low-pressure acetylene cylinders.

            So, I really hadn’t thought about the pressure cooker issue. 😉

        • Hmmmmm, you might look a little suspicious carrying a bottle of ANFO around, and then setting it down in a crowd. Of course the pressure cooker isn’t going to go over too well after the Boston thing.

          Back to busting caps with a sledge hammer!

          • Yeah, the original point was about making noise. My brother borrowed Dad’s Crescent wrench and squeezed the roll of caps in its jaws, then whacked the sidewalk with the wrench. That kind of bothered me because I figured it’d be kinda hard on the wrench.

            Anybody ever made a matchhead gun out of a clothespin? >:->

        • I’ve made those a loooooooooooong time ago, We also use to take a nut, and two bolts and put match heads between the bolts ends, in the nut. We would screw them up tight and throw them up in the air on paved street. When they came down and hit the street they would go off. It was a stupid dangerous thing to do. Glad I grew out of that and went on to doing more resourceful things, like chasing women.
          Probably should have stayed with the match heads

  44. Cowboy-style cap guns. Water pistols, mostly resembling real guns like the Luger (model name “Lugee”). A couple of “space guns” that looked like nothing on Earth. Spring-loaded dart guns. Home-made linoleum guns that really hurt if you got shot with one. And probably a lot that I’ve forgotten.

  45. I had enough cap and other toy weaponry to arm a small South-American militia. Everything from cast iron Colt SAA lookalikes to a minigun with lights, sounds, and spinning barrels that ate paper roll caps for breakfast. My favorite piece is the Lone Star Luger cap gun that my grandpa bought for my uncle in the 50’s. I had no idea what kind of gun it was as a kid, and didn’t realize it was a Luger until I found it in the toy closet two years ago. It, like the remaining cap guns that weren’t lost in the woods, is thoroughly worn out and broken from decades of gunfights in the back yard. It’s still priceless to me and serves as a reminder that I had a better childhood than most.

    After 9/11 the progressive NJ soccer moms threw away their kids’ toy guns in the hopes of pacifying them. This backfired and only made their sons want to hang out at my house even more, which they gladly did as “boys will be boys” was the rule of the day. Some of these parents were visibly bothered that I was allowed to have such reckless fun and watch Clint Eastwood westerns at that age, wondering why I didn’t have one of those overly regulated, self-esteem movement childhoods that were so popular in the 90’s. All their kids now have criminal records for drugs, theft, and god knows what else. I got one speeding ticket.

  46. Well funny story… Once when I was a kid I had a REAL gun for a toy… let me explain…

    I’m a child of the 80s myself. I’m also a child from the deep backwoods of the Appalachians. Read: crazy unwashed hill folk. You know those guys from Deliverance? Yeah… that kind of crazy… and… you know what? Another side story: one of those actors from Deliverance still lives in the town I was living in before I moved away from NC. He walks around with a squirrel on a leash. http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1568313856/nm0184662?ref_=nmmi_mi_all_pos_9

    Anyway… one day I was playing with my many many unwashed cousins running around playing guns. Problem is that I didn’t have one. So my uncle rooted around in a close and gave me this broken ‘Saturday Night Special’. Oh I couldn’t even begin to remember what it was. But it was broke and was actually missing the cylinder. But it did ‘click’ when the trigger was pulled. So… I spent an entire day running around playing guns with a real, if permanently broke, gun.

    This is not anything I’d ever RECOMMEND doing… but hey… it was the 80s in North Carolina.

  47. I made a lot of my own “guns” using wood or pipes. I had some neat toy guns like the Rambo 1911 with an actual moving slide and noises. I also had a mini uni cap gun. They were fun toys when we played army in the neighborhood.

  48. I had every kind of toy gun from the time I was knee-high. Have pictures of me at about 4 with my twin six shooters on – and it just evolved from there. Dart guns, Cap guns, Water guns, Guns that shot little plastic balls, then BB guns – and of course real guns, starting at about age 12 when I ranked #2 in the State Boy Scouts Marksmanship contest shooting .22 LR. My favorite was an old ivory handled Colt SA that had been rendered inert. I used to put my Dad’s (Army) Captain’s helmet on and pretend I was Patton lol.

  49. I think one of my favorites was a Mattel Winchester rifle. It held a roll of caps, but it also had special ammo that would shoot a plastic bullet, and eject a plastic shell. Of course, most of that ammo was lost fairly quickly, but it still worked as a great cap gun. It also had a nice feature where you could flip a small lever down, and it would fire automatically with each rack of the lever. It made for some nice Chuck Connors imitations of the ole “Rifleman” reruns. I think there’s an old commercial of this rifle on YouTube.

    • I remember that one. Carried one to “Western Day”, about the second grade or so. We were doing a play and the teachers wanted me to carry it on stage. Times were different then for sure.

      • In ’66, ’67 (ish) my high school play had a battle scene, and kids brought rifles from home to use in the battle, firing blanks. They also threw together a few black powder flashpots to simulate explosions. For the big stabbing scene, one of the guys had an actual bayonet, and the teacher showed the kid how to do a stage stabbing with it. Ah, those were the days!

  50. Late 50’s early 60’s it was Roy Rogers or Gene Autry cap gun six shooters, holster included. Also had a B-52 Ball Turret that we placed on the top bunk when playing Strategic Air Command shooting down commie Migs.

  51. – plastic revolvers and pistols with orange tips
    – plastic MP5 w/ retractable stock that when the gun was cocked and the trigger was pulled made a machine gun noise
    – plastic Tec9 that when the trigger was pulled made noise
    – wooden rubber band guns
    – cap guns
    – water guns of all types from dollar store palm pistols to Super Soakers to almost real size replicas of an M16A1 and an AK-47 that shot water as well as made a sound when you pulled the trigger. The water shooting sucked but I never used them as a water gun anyway. They were bought for me in Rehoboth Beach, DE of all places on the boardwalk. Of course this was all back in the 90’s.
    – airsoft spring-loaded Thompson SMG, the only one I have left
    – BB rifle
    – wooden M1 carbine looking rifle with plastic tip that also made noise when the trigger was pulled
    – wooden 1861 Springfield musket toy from Harper’s Ferry, WV

  52. I had a lever gun that made a nice “shooting” sound and a puff of smoke, and a 3/4scale FAL cap gun. Both realistic looking with no orange tips. These were in the UK 40 years ago Now I have the real thing.

  53. All steel German Luger and 1911. This was in the 1960’s when we had real toys.

  54. My favorite were the Mattel camo Tommy guns both with and without a roll of caps. I had several.

  55. This has been an interesting thing. Almost forgot the ones I have now. Well they were actually my grandkids and my daughter was having a garage sale and i just couldn’t resist. One is an over/under shotgun (plastic) with a small battery powered speaker that when you pull the trigger makes a decent gun shot noise and if you pull the trigger fast enough it can do a full auto that sounds a little like a 20 MM aircraft gun. Also found an toy AR that is real close to the same size and weight of a real one,even has a detachable 20 rd mag. It was missing the upper hand guard that looked to house some sort of large battery pack which I guess made noise and shot plastic BBs. I cut a piece of 2 inch PCV in half length ways and fastened it and painted the toy flat black (it was some kind of weird camo) It looks pretty convincing. Guess some people never grow up.

  57. Growing up in the mid to late 80’s, my favorite was a Thompson sub-machine like toy gun that was made of metal and wood, really nicely made, impossible to destroy. I remember going to Toys R Us back in the day, and they had actual wood gun racks lined with toy rifles that looked very realistic, with only a orange cap on the muzzle to show they weren’t the real deal. Also had some very realistic looking flint lock style toy pistols and a rifle my parents had bought my brother and I at a gift shop in Disneyland next to the pirates of the Caribbean ride. We also had more Super soakers, nerf guns, and cap guns than I could ever remember.

    Of course some of my fondest childhood memories are shooting B.B. guns and pellet guns in my uncles backyard with my cousin and brother, usually always unsupervised, yet we never once hurt ourselves or anyone else.

  59. Mr. Grise you’re right-my wife says I’m going through my second childhood and I say that’s not true-never got out of the first one.

  62. A really cool silver .45 ACP cap gun, and a lugar cap-gun that I traded for with some baseball cards, also got a set of Roy Rodgers cap-guns for my 6th Birthday, Mom sold them all at a rummage sale so we could move to another state! a few years later I got the real deal and never looked back, LOL

  63. Speaking of breakfast food & guns…I blame my”gun nuttiness” on Sugar Pops Pete! In my day, he had a pair of shootin’ arms.

  64. Speaking of breakfast food & guns…I blame my”gun nuttiness” on Sugar Pops Pete! In my day, he had a pair of shootin’ arns.

  65. Mom wasn’t really into toy guns, even though my brother and I learned how to shoot on some bolt action .22s in like 2nd grade and got some air rifles a few years later. We just used Legos until we discovered Airsoft. I rember lots of ‘time outs’ from our battles when someone’s Lego M4 turned back to to just a bunch Legos upon eating shit running up and down the stairs. Good times.

  66. I had a Daisy Red Rider BB levergun. Found out early never to pull the trigger with the lever unlocked; still have the scar in the web between my thumb and forefinger 50 years later. I did find out that if you unscrewed the barrel assembly from the muzzle of the gun you could load a chunk of steel in the shroud and fire it with the piston ala the Bazooka guy in ‘Combat’. Spent a lot of afternoons shooting at bottles and planks posing as Nazi Panzers on our farm in rural Maine…

  67. I had a lot of die cast revolvers and several from Parris.
    I remember a lever action yellow boy, a double barrel shotgun, a “Kentucky” rifle, and a couple different single shot horse pistols. We went through a pirate phase, so the single shots were fun. When several of the Parris guns broke, I used the parts to build a single shot “Sharps” that ended up being a gift to a neighbor kid. I also had a Parris bolt action drill rifle. Getting more modern, I had a Daisy AK-47, a couple Berettas that used the plastic strip caps, and a battery operated minigun with rotating barrels that also used paper roll caps – but I never used caps in it.

  68. No one’s gonna mention those plastic ray gun looking pistols with a fixed mag that shot little plastic disks? Mom loved vacuuming those disks…
    Also, I’d forgotten about those little yellow rubber bb guns! Had a couple of those. And a few cap guns, both roll and disk. But my favorites were a PPK with strip caps and detachable mag (like mentioned above) and a WWII Tommy (squirt) gun. Thanks for the trip down memory TTAG!

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