Toy Guns

Question: My sons, 11 and 13, and I will be traveling to visit friends in Europe this summer with boys the same ages. My sons are very excited and want to take some things to enjoy with their new friends. We were considering taking Nerf guns that shoot soft Nerf darts. Alternatively, Hammacher Schlemmer makes a "gun" that shoots ping-pong balls. Would we be able to pack these in our luggage without a problem? --Patricia Cavender, San Marino Answer: The Transportation Security Administration says yes. Nico Melendez, spokesman for the TSA, said the toys "shouldn't be a problem.

It's not just tuition Re "Tuition deal for immigrants upheld," June 7 I certainly can empathize with someone who is brought here illegally as a child and who now wants to go to college. But it still doesn't sit well with me because the state has less than zero extra cash and because we are also fine with charging legal residents from outside California many thousands of dollars more than an undocumented resident. William G. Tierney, the director of USC's Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis, is quoted as saying, "It's good economic policy for the state to have more educated workers.

Three cheers for our legislators who are now busy passing laws to ban the sale of toy guns. Dare we hope they will one day be brave enough to ban real guns too? N.A. DAVIS Rancho Palos Verdes

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck is proposing that the city require BB-gun replicas of actual firearms to be brightly colored so that police officers don't mistake them for real weapons. The proposal, which the Los Angeles Police Commission will consider Tuesday, comes after two shootings involving officers and people with replica weapons, including one in which a teenager was wounded. Under the new rule, all such toys sold inLos Angeles would have the "entire exterior surface of the device white, bright red, bright orange, bright yellow, bright green, bright blue, bright pink or bright purple.

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck is proposing that the city require BB-gun replicas of actual firearms to be brightly colored so that police officers don't mistake them for real weapons. The proposal, which the Los Angeles Police Commission will consider Tuesday, comes after two shootings involving officers and people with replica weapons, including one in which a teenager was wounded. Under the new rule, all such toys sold inLos Angeles would have the "entire exterior surface of the device white, bright red, bright orange, bright yellow, bright green, bright blue, bright pink or bright purple.

Catherine Fuller, in her commentary, "Boyhood Cowboys Don't Become Adult Killers" (Aug. 21), seems hardly aware of the nation's daily news fare, nor the decades of TV and motion picture violence, sexuality and brutality that children have absorbed on their way to pre-adult maturity, and the very direct relationship of that entertainment violence to the lost innocence of those imaginative "boyhood cowboys" she refers to. About 50 years ago, children playing...

I was at Disneyland after they removed all the violent video games (May 14). I thought it was hypocritical that they are still selling toy guns for children. Toy guns are more realistic than video games. They open children to thinking playing with toy guns is OK. Disneyland should get rid of the guns too. LINDSAY WOOLDRIDGE Foothill Ranch

A seventh-grader at Maclay Junior High School in Pacoima was suspended because school officials found a toy gun in his knapsack. Principal Leonard George said the student's toy gun was discovered Wednesday after an assistant principal began looking for students who had left the campus during lunch. When the assistant principal approached the seventh-grader, the boy threw the knapsack "away from where he was sitting, as if to say, 'This isn't mine,' " George said.

Retired Gen. Ariel Sharon, now Israel's trade minister, has declared war on toy guns that injure children, the Trade Ministry said Monday. The hard-line former defense minister, architect of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, signed an order banning import, manufacture and sale of dangerous toys. They include toy guns that fire projectiles or detonate caps and--apparently for security reasons--toy weapons that look like the real thing.

A toy manufacturer's plan to mark toy guns to distinguish them from real weapons is a "Band-Aid" measure and probably will not change Burbank officials' minds about banning sales of the toy replicas, the city's mayor said. Daisy Manufacturing Co. of Arkansas, a leading marketer of toy guns, decided to put orange markings on its full-scale toy guns after KNBC-TV consumer reporter David Horowitz was threatened by a Daisy toy gun during a live news broadcast Aug. 19.

An apparent game in which teenagers armed with pellet guns shot at one another on a dark Glassell Park street took a tragic turn when a Los Angeles police officer fired on one of the youths because he thought he was being threatened with a real handgun, police said. Officer Victor Abarca and his partner were on patrol in the LAPD's Northeast Division at 7:50 p.m. Thursday when they saw three people standing in the 3000 block of North Verdugo Road and stopped to investigate. All three ran as the police stopped their patrol car. Abarca, a three-year veteran, encountered one of the participants standing behind a parked van on the side of the street, police said.

I promised I would bring the gun. I would buy it in New York, where I was going to see my publisher. It should have been the easiest thing in the world. I wasn't planning to draw down on a murder suspect. This was for an author photo to appear on the jacket of my novel "Judas Horse," the latest in my series of mysteries about FBI Special Agent Ana Grey. How better for a crime writer to appear than armed and dangerous? So before I left Los Angeles, I secured a leather shoulder holster on loan from a law enforcement friend.

A boy in Palmdale who was playing cops and robbers with a toy gun was shot and wounded Sunday night by a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy, authorities said. The boy was shot in the upper torso and was expected to survive, said Deputy Ed Hernandez, a sheriff's spokesman. He declined to release the victim's name or age. Hernandez said that deputies responded about 8 p.m. to reports of a person brandishing a weapon and that the suspect pointed the gun at the officers.

Four days after officers fatally shot a homeless man who had a toy gun in his waistband, Inglewood Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks broke her silence on the shooting Thursday, expressing concerns about the officers' tactics and saying she had placed seven of them on administrative leave. "We could have done a better job tactically," Seabrooks said of Sunday's shooting in which officers fired as many as 47 rounds, killing the man and wounding a motorist as well as a dog. "I would have preferred that far fewer rounds would have been fired."

Question: My sons, 11 and 13, and I will be traveling to visit friends in Europe this summer with boys the same ages. My sons are very excited and want to take some things to enjoy with their new friends. We were considering taking Nerf guns that shoot soft Nerf darts. Alternatively, Hammacher Schlemmer makes a "gun" that shoots ping-pong balls. Would we be able to pack these in our luggage without a problem? --Patricia Cavender, San Marino Answer: The Transportation Security Administration says yes. Nico Melendez, spokesman for the TSA, said the toys "shouldn't be a problem.

Question: My sons, 11 and 13, and I will be traveling to visit friends in Europe this summer with boys the same ages. My sons are very excited and want to take some things to enjoy with their new friends. We were considering taking Nerf guns that shoot soft Nerf darts. Alternatively, Hammacher Schlemmer makes a "gun" that shoots ping-pong balls. Would we be able to pack these in our luggage without a problem?

A 13-year-old Monte Vista Middle School student was briefly detained Monday after a bus driver reported that the boy had a gun while aboard the bus. The driver originally reported that the gun was real, but the boy, who threw it out the bus window after realizing the driver spotted him, told Riverside County sheriff's deputies that it fired only small plastic balls. Deputies said they later retrieved it on a side street.

An Ontario police officer shot and wounded a 15-year-old boy Tuesday night after chasing the youth behind a Kmart where officials say the boy pulled out what appeared to be a .44-caliber magnum handgun. The weapon turned out to be a toy. The chase began shortly before 9 p.m. after a witness reported four boys hiding in bushes, pointing guns at motorists. When police arrived, two of the juveniles fled, ignoring the officers' order to halt and drop their weapons. The other two surrendered.