The above picture came across the news feed the other day. For those familiar with the RBTA position on such things, even Cerakoted guns, when colored in any of the colors commonly associated with training devices, are a bad idea in our opinion. There is no quibbling with anyone’s RIGHT to have such things, but common sense calls into question a desire to do so, in light of the confusion that they can create in a training environment. We have heard all of the arguments for and against. And we steadfastly remain in the “against” camp. Our reasoning is simple. Responsible trainers have for some time equated various colors with conditions of weapons … i.e. Red Guns were inert, Blue Guns either inert or designed to fire specialty training munitions. RBTA takes it a bit further, relegating certain conditions of devices for training to very specific colors when utilized in any of our training venues. This is not the place to do a deep dive into that. The point here is, creating more guns that could be easily mistaken for toy guns or training guns puts in motion the conditions that have, in the past, led to lethal tragedy. And with the larger proliferation of training technologies to the more broadly based civilian training community, and the exponential growth of the community of journeyman “trainers” and “realistic” training venues, the problem grows larger.
Add the Cancel Culture and those possessed of anti-gun ideologies, to give them even a single instance for caterwauling about the evils of firearms and the conflation of toys and real guns … well, when such an argument could be 100% avoidable, providing the anti-gun crowd with any sort of lever (absent the very real dangers) is just a bad idea. Making a firearm that looks like it is made out of Lego is inviting tragedy. And divisiveness within the already fragmented firearms community. The manufacturer of the Block 19 adds a disclaimer with regards to responsible ownership. Not compelling. The manufacturers can put all of the warnings they want on their website about responsible gun storage, but it will be cold comfort in the wake of a tragedy where an UNRESPONSIBLE gun owner leaves his Block 19 out for the seconds it takes for an unknowledgeable person (most likely a curious child) to pick it up and do something tragic.
So we felt it necessary to weigh in on this one. In our view, particularly in this case and to all of the other fashion gun creators, you can do better. Much better. To those thinking these guns are harmless and our point of view is hysterical, there really won’t be any middle ground but that’s OK. We will maintain our position on the colored guns thing, and hope that some fence sitters will reconsider that there are very real dangers that the playful coloring of guns can create. So, is it really worth it?
Stay safe!