![]() ![]() If there's a lesson to be learned from all of this, it should be that toys and relaxing lawn games shouldn't be made out of actual weapons of war.In the current version of the article, there is a reference to a 1997 death, followed by phrase "citation needed". And then you have people like my parents, who probably never saw or heard of the ban at all, and allowed me and my sister to play with our set until well into the 1990s. Subcultures also exist who revel in their forbidden lawn game. Though they appear to be sold out now, at least one company skirted the ban by selling lawn dart components online. In 1988, the Commission voted to ban lawn darts sales completely.īut that's not the end of the story. Lawn darts had also killed two other children: a 4-year-old, and a 13-year-old. "Approximately 81 percent of the victims were under 15 years old, and 50 percent were under the age of 10." "From January, 1978 to December 1986 lawn darts were responsible for an estimated 6,100 hospital emergency-room treated injuries," the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported. According to Mental Floss, the commission believed there had only been a few dozen injuries. The Commission, it turned out had misidentified how many injuries lawn darts had caused and had to update its statistics. He launched a lobbying campaign, appealing to the Consumer Product Safety Commission to re-evaluate the injuries and deaths caused by lawn darts. The father of a 7-year-old girl who died in a lawn dart accident, David Snow, made it his mission to get the game banned. Unfortunately, this did little to stem the tide of injuries, and the more information that came out, the worse the picture appeared. ![]() Needless to say, the ancient Romans weren't aiming for a plastic circle. Thought to have originated around 500 BCE, plumbata were basically the same thing as lawn darts: weighted spikes thrown from a distance with the intention of landing somewhere soft. The roots of lawn darts don't come from the popular bar game they're named after, instead their history can be found in an ancient Greet and Roman war weapon called a plumbata. ![]() In fact, they have a much older history that definitely foreshadowed their violent implications. Lawn darts weren't the brainchild of the 1950s. ![]() This ban had to be reissued in 1997 and people were urged to destroy the game. Lawn darts were banned in America by the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1988 for the severe danger that they presented. If you've never played the game, there's a good reason. SEE ALSO: We continue riding the waves of nostalgia with the Roller Racer It was essentially the same game as horseshoes or cornhole, only with metal spikes raining down from the sky instead of bean bags. If you're unfamiliar with lawn darts, or Jarts as they're sometimes known, it was a game developed in the mid-20th century, in which weighted spikes were tossed into the air with the hopes of landing in a plastic circle placed some paces away. There are a lot of dangerous children's toys from previous decades, from Sky Dancers to Moon Shoes, but one particularly perilous game stands apart from the rest: lawn darts. Break through the haze of nostalgia with us and see what holds up, what disappoints, and what got better with time. This post is part of Mashable's You're Old Week. ![]()
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