I swear there was a hand cranked bicycle handlebar-mounted BB 'machine gun' advertised in Boy's Life magazine that Mom and Dad adamantly vetoed, way back when.

Net-searching hasn't found that for me but I did find this article. The author was obviously a basement-dwelling-snowflake-pajama-boy back before basement-dwelling-snowflake-pajama-boys were cool , but the included images of advertisements are great.


By Yeoman Lowbrow on December 16, 2014
"Boys’ Life magazine in the 1950s and 1960s was basically a manual on how to be popular and shoot things. Here’s a few snippets from a November 1965 issue. We’ll start with a comic strip on the glories of playing with rifles:"





https://flashbak.com/happiness...-life-adverts-25089/

In the late 1950's we walked around the neighborhood with our BB guns & shot at birds & things. My Presbyterian minister was a Reserve Chaplain & took the youth group shooting 22's behind the church. We also shot 22's at Boy Scout camp. When I was younger it was OK to take cap pistols to school as long as you did not shoot them in the hall.

We walked around in the streets with our BB guns and air guns in the late 70s. Went back "in the woods" behind the neighborhood houses and shot for hours. No one ever complained.

When I went to school, we had a student smoking area, you could wear a knife to school on your belt, and my junior-high-school shop teacher told me to bring my Daisy 880 air rifle to school so he could help me fix a loose stock.

Those were the days.