Flower gun

Ok, the (admittedly a bit crazy) design of this toy was prompted by my 3 years old son who – not unusual for his gender and age – is somewhat fixated on guns. I am not exactly thrilled by his infatuation with guns, and I certainly don’t want to promote it.

So that made me think: A complete gun embargo would just increase the lure of the forbidden. What, then, should a gun look like which is completely harmless, possibly even peaceful? A hippie gun – a flower gun:

And what can I say, this unlikely cross between a B movie space gun and a blunderbuss (the widening muzzle of which is supposed to facilitate front loading) was a full success: My kids loved it.

Well, this gun is still fun even if you’re at the wrong end of the barrel. The kids pretend shoot each other with ‘daisies’, so much so that the gun is now called the ‘daisy gun’ in our household (although the muzzle looks nothing like a daisy blossom, but heck we are not botanists).

I have no photo tutorial as of now, but the gun is relatively easy to build. I have labeled the flaps and corresponding edges with numbers, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out which part goes where.