
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, October 20, 1994                   TAG: 9410210008
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-16   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

UZIS AREN'T US

ONLY 65 shopping days until Christmas. A season when you expect toy merchants to do everything possible to increase sales, certainly nothing that might limit them.

Which only makes more commendable the steps that some toy merchants are taking to reduce inventories of real-looking toy guns, or to banish them altogether from their shelves.

Toys `R' Us, the world's largest toy retailer, made the decision last week in the wake of recent shootings of two New York City youths whose toy guns were mistaken by police for real weapons. KayBee Toys Inc., a national chain, is taking similar action, and other big toy-retailers are considering it.

It's an appropriate and conscientious response by businesses, not simply to the New York shootings, but to the horrific culture of violence that is feeding, and being fed by, children's fascination with guns. And not just toy guns. Real ones, too - the kind that killed almost 50,000 American youngsters between 1979 and 1991, that are still killing the equivalent of a classroomful of American children every couple of days.

To be sure, the toy retailers might not be taking this action were it not for growing pressure from parents, who complain that toy stores are undermining their efforts to steer young children away from shoot-'em-up games that have lost the innocent flavor they had in past decades. "Go to any toy store," wrote Jeannine Melancon Parnham of Clifton Forge in a recent letter to the editor, "and there is at least a whole aisle of guns and weapons'' encouraging infatuation with violence.

It can be argued, of course, that parents should just say no to those look-alike Uzis in the toy-store arsenals. But parents, in the face of media and other pressures on their children, can use all the help they can get.

So, for that matter, can law-enforcement officers. Every year, police departments seize hundreds of fake guns that are involved in crimes. Every year, there are incidents in which police are threatened by toy-gun toters, incidents in which terrible mistakes can happen. As in the New York shootings, someone can get killed - for real.

Retailers that limit the kind of toy guns they'll stock are unlikely to go bust as a result. They should be wished a joyous season of sales.

by CNB