if you're gonna do something, do it right

Because it's not a real family fun night unless someone gets taken to the emergency room for an eye injury...

The folks at Crosman must have been a little worried about the switch from an outdoor to a rumpus room-based leisure economy, hence this attempt at preventing a loss in market share to manufacturers of foosball and air hockey tables. (The "Safe Shooter" game targets suggest that they also had one concerned eye pointed Atari's way as well.) Sadly, their efforts to promote the casual discharging of firearms in a domestic environment only caught on with Elvis Presley and right-wing separatists with grudges against the Freemasons.

Then again, this ad was published at a time ("the seventies") when lawn darts and click-clacks were considered appropriate for children. Childhood back then was a lesson in painful real-world empiricism leavened with copious amounts of Mercurochrome, unlike today's world of bubblewrapped and hermetically-sealed children. How is America going to compete globally if the the current generation of kids doesn't learn important lessons like "if you toss beer bottles at the boulder by the train tracks, odds are you will end up with a deep pitted scar on your right elbow?"

Swindled - Who Wants Guns? (from a 1982 single) - In my personal experience, usually the last person on earth who has any business owning one.

Echobelly - Give Her a Gun (from Everybody's Got One, 1994) - This is a bit like the SCUM Manifesto as rewritten by Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx and set to a Britpop beat.