Squirt, Squirt, You're Dead

THE ESCALATION OF WATER WEAPONRY FROM squirt gun to Super Soaker reached its apotheosis last week when Richard Cook, 16, sprayed the wrong guy with a high- power water gun and ended up in a Harlem hospital with a real 9-mm bullet lodged in his back. The new generation of water weapons, with their bulbous tanks and high-pressure air pumps, splash so hard, squirt so far and are so wildly popular (Larami's Super Soaker is the fastest-selling summer toy in the U.S. for the second year in a row) that some public officials fear the summer may be not just long and hot, but dangerously wet as well, if angry soakees shoot back with live ammunition. The mayor of Boston, reacting to a soaking and shooting that left a 15-year-old boy dead last month, asked city stores to take the water guns off their shelves. A Michigan state senator last week called for an outright ban.

The politicians seem to be aiming in the wrong direction. As a report published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association makes clear, the problem is not toy guns but real guns. Gunshot wounds are now the second leading cause of death among high school-age children in the U.S., and are rising at a faster rate than any other cause, a situation the Journal characterized as a public health epidemic. Yet the Brady gun-control bill, part of the crime package the Bush Administration opposes, is languishing in the U.S. Senate. And what few laws have been passed to restrict the use of firearms are themselves under attack. The same week public officials were talking about outlawing squirt guns, New Jersey Republicans were mounting an attempt to repeal a state law that bans military-style assault weapons.