By Laura Vozzella, The Baltimore Sun
The BB gun, like the classic Red Ryder celebrated in a popular holiday film, is a traditional Christmas gift that always has come wrapped in a certain risk. Now the toy carries a threat that has nothing to do with putting an eye out: a $500 fine and two months in jail.
It is a misdemeanor in Baltimore to sell or give a BB gun to anyone younger than 18, under an ordinance adopted by the City Council this month.
In one of the nation’s most murderous cities, where juvenile homicides are up 50 percent this year compared with last, officials are fed up with toy guns that look like the real thing.
“We’re dealing with a different element now,” said Sheila Dixon, council president. “If you give it to a minor and we trace it back, that person will be fined or charged with a crime.”
Forget the romance of the Red Ryder, the wooden-stock BB rifle designed in 1938 and portrayed as a boy’s to-die-for holiday gift in the 1983 movie, “A Christmas Story.” Some of the most popular BB guns these days don’t resemble the long guns of the Wild West, but the semiautomatic pistols packed by street thugs.
And some in Baltimore are using them to prey on people, police say.
City police do not track how often BB guns are used to commit crimes but say they’re turning up more often in the hands of offenders. The toys are much easier to obtain than real weapons and won’t result in gun charges in the event of an arrest.
Two 15-year-olds — one armed with a BB gun, the other with a knife — robbed and stabbed Wendell Rawlings last month outside the home of his sister, City Council Vice President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.
“Unfortunately our youth aren’t using them for recreation,” Rawlings-Blake said.
Gun-rights advocates say the city has bigger problems than BBs. They point to recent high-profile crimes — a police officer gunned down last month, apparently for testifying in a criminal case; a family of seven wiped out in an October fire that police believe was set to punish them for reporting neighborhood drug-dealing — and call a crackdown on toys silly.
“They’ve been whacking witnesses and intimidating people. It’s as bad as Chicago ever was,” said Roy Tarbutton, legislative vice president for the Maryland State Rifle and Pistol Association. “They can keep doing all the feel-good stuff they want to do. They’re not addressing the problems.
“They can’t control the drugs; they can’t control the guns on the streets.”
What makes the toys dangerous is precisely what makes them appealing to wannabe gunslingers: They’re dead ringers for the real thing.
“You should see some of these guns, said Baltimore police Col. Robert Stanton. “The slide works; the magazine comes out.”
Stanton said he had a “Winchester-looking air gun” as a child growing up on suburban Long Island, but he shakes his head at toys like the pellet gun he displayed at a recent meeting of police officials.
“It looked so much like a Glock 17, when I put it on the table to show the commanders, a couple of them wouldn’t pick it up because they thought it was a real gun,” he said. “It can be really frightening.
“We just had a homicide in the Western District where the robber wielded a BB gun and the victim in the robbery produced a real gun and shot him dead,” he said. “They do look real, and in the dark and in the moment, with the element of fear involved, you don’t really have time to discern.”
David Carter, a criminal-justice professor at Michigan State University, said he interviewed a number of officers who were involved in such shootings. “They just couldn’t come to grips with it, they couldn’t cope with it,” he said. “It destroyed his or her life once they discovered they had shot and killed a person and that person just had a toy gun.”
The online catalog for Daisy Outdoor Products of Rogers, Ark., a leading BB gun maker, boasts of the “contemporary styling” of its pistols. “Looks like the real thing,” it reads.
The Daisy catalog also includes a warning that BB guns should not be considered toys and should be used only under adult supervision.
Joe Murfin, director of marketing for Daisy, declined to comment on Baltimore’s ordinance, except to note that Daisy requires mail-order customers to provide an affidavit certifying they are at least 21 years old.