Die Mofo

I am convinced that Nerf is in league with various military organizations to prepare young boys for a career in the armed forces.

I mean, really, have you seen the weaponry that this company is putting out these days? It is so bad ass that firing some of the new Nerf hardware gets the testosterone surging and makes me feel like trucking myself off to the mountains of Afghanistan to fight insurgents.

It started a couple of Christmases ago when Santa Claus decided that nothing says “Happy Birthday Jesus” better than providing my son with a fully automatic method of delivering foam projectiles all over our living room.

The assault rifle in question is called the Nerf Magstrike, and it comes with two ten-shot magazines. When fully pumped it can empty one of these magazines in a little over a second, and it makes one helluva racket in the process.

This is what it looks like:

At this point I was admonished by my wife to let him play with it for a while before I started hogging the thing, but fortunately for me a short time later my son was drawn back to the pile of still-wrapped presents that were in need of eviscerating from their packaging and I got a chance to launch some foam death of my own.

I loaded up the magazine, slammed it into place like Bruce Willis getting ready to go all Die Hard on someone’s ass, pumped up the air chamber, and let fly with a volley of projectiles at my wife’s butt. She turned around and gave me a dirty look, and the thought that came into my head at that moment was, I wish I had a cat.

If you were a sick and twisted individual then I could see how using such weaponry on a small feline could be a real riot. Not for the cat, but for the shooter. Alas, I love animals and don’t think they should be tormented for one’s amusement. Still, if it was the neighbor’s cat ripping apart my garbage…

Flash forward a couple of years to my son’s recent birthday party. His arsenal of Nerf weaponry has expanded threefold. Not only are these guns getting more and more impressive, but they’re starting to look strikingly familiar to anyone who enjoys watching war movies.

Now I’ll be damned if that thing – bright colors aside – doesn’t look a lot like a real military weapon. It’s designed as a sniper weapon with a scope and fold-out legs at the bottom to allow for laying prone and steadying one’s aim. The idea is to never give the enemy any warning that he’s about to get a Nerf cap in his ass.

That wasn’t the only new addition. He also got the Nerf N Strike Vulcan EBF-25, and have you noticed the increasingly military sounding terminology in the naming of these guns? Well, check this sucker out:

It’s big and heavy and loud and can fire 25 rounds non-stop at whatever it is that you want to make die. Of course, I had to try it out myself. I wandered the house, my son’s gun in hand, looking for targets to destroy.

My son interrupted my seek and destroy mission with: “Daddy, what does ‘die mofo’ mean?” Oops. I hadn’t intended to say that aloud.

Now I’m no stranger to guns. I had toy guns as a kid and relished in shooting my step-brothers in the head with those crappy plunger dart guns every chance I got. Then as I got older I owned pellet guns, and although I may have wanted to I never actually shot either step-brother with them. I fear this was more out of a desire to stay out of trouble and retain possession of my weaponry rather than any pacifistic desire to not inflict harm upon them. As I grew older still I learned how to fire rifles and handguns.

Even though I keep my hair buzzed short in a military fashion, I never seriously considered joining the army. I think that’s because I didn’t get enough of a thirst for combat as a youngster to really want to enlist (or maybe I’m just a chickenshit), and now with recruitment for armed forces suffering they’re upping the ante. They want a new generation of soldiers hungry to bring peace and democracy to the world through superior firepower, and the way to achieve that is to get potential recruits to start thinking about military service at a young age.

Nerf is probably handled through a few shell corporations, but I’m convinced that there is a military ownership of the company, and they’re influencing product design to create a new generation of soldiers. Today’s kids will get their thirst for fancy, high-powered weaponry that can’t be quenched at the gun range or playing paintball, and recruiting offices will start to get busier.

The enemy doesn’t stand a chance.

Want to receive updates of new content? Fill out the form below. I keep your email private and you can unsubscribe any time.