Gun safety?

Two of my grand daughters -- the twins, came down yesterday for a visit. It is close to their birthday so my wife bought them a bunch of stuff including a pair of super soaker style squirt guns. It was the first 80 degree day of the year here on south shore MA, so obviously the girls wanted to break out the squirters.

I grabbed my toolbox and began the process of liberating the toys from the cardboard display box that were held in place by about a half dozen plastic zip tie thingys. Clearly, China has cheaper petroleum prices than we do that allows them to include this extravagance in their packaging. Several snips freed the first of the bright orange, green, and blue pieces of plastic crap. The first thing I noticed was the trigger would not operate as I would have expected. Closer inspection revealed another, tinier, plastic zip tie securing a color coordinated chunk of plastic against the trigger. Clip, clip.

Really? A trigger lock on a $7 toy squirt gun? To compound this absurdity, the chunk of plastic was wedged against the trigger in a way that held the trigger in the depressed position. If I weren't a trained, responsible, safety minded gun owner, I might have loaded up the reservoir and started pumping -- possibly subjecting innocent bystanders to an anemic stream of deadly Di-hydrogen monoxide (water). I first thought that perhaps the crack CCP engineers anticipated this potential danger and decided to ship a product that simply didn't work -- the pump did nothing but cause water to leak out a bit faster than gravity would have accomplished on its own, and depressing the trigger also did nothing. OK.

In for a penny, etc ... , I depackaged the second toy -- same trigger lock abomination installed the same way, but this one actually pumped up enough to emit a frightening three foot stream in the direction of a potential foe.

After apologizing for the defective toy and promising to make amends for their next visit, I convinced the twins to share the toy that "worked" and they joined forces to wipe out an ant hill in the back yard. Until it was dropped on the deck while reloading -- the details are sketchy but the incident was fatal to the squirter. So we unscrewed the water reservoirs from both guns and the girls entertained themselves by dousing each other from the only part of the toy that actually worked. 'Merica.

This is where we are now.