Gather round, younger readers, because grampa’s about to wax nostalgic for a time when danger was the spice of life, when we played hard and lived harder, before the world got overrun by a bunch of sniveling, bubble-wrapped snowflakes who can’t handle a little risk without clutching their emotional support water bottles. I’m talking about Lawn Darts—those glorious, foot-long harbingers of chaos, with their weighted metal spikes and plastic fins, designed to be lobbed underhand at a plastic ring on the grass, sticking into the earth with a satisfying thunk that said, “Yeah, I’m alive, and I’m not afraid to prove it.” They were the backyard gladiator’s weapon of choice, a game that separated the reckless from the timid, and I miss them with the kind of aching, bone-deep longing that makes me want to scream into the void until the universe gives me back my damn Jarts®.

Picture this: it’s the 1970s, and you’re a kid in the suburbs, the sun beating down on your un-sunscreened shoulders because nobody gave a rat’s ass about UV rays back then. You’ve got a set of Lawn Darts—12 inches of pure, unadulterated potential, a metal tip that’s not sharp enough to look dangerous but heavy enough to do some real damage if you’re careless, which, let’s be honest, we all were. You’d stand 35 feet from the target, or closer if you were feeling particularly unhinged, and you’d toss those bad boys with a flick of the wrist, watching them arc through the air like a Roman plumbata—yeah, those ancient war weapons from 500 BCE that inspired this whole beautiful mess—hoping to land a ringer and score three points, or at least get closer than your opponent’s throw to snag a measly one point. It was a game of skill, sure, but also a game of guts, because you had to stand there while your buddy chucked a metal spear in your general direction, and if you flinched, you were the loser in more ways than one.

But here’s the rub, the dark little footnote that makes the safety police clutch their pearls: Lawn Darts were dangerous as hell, and they racked up a body count that would make a slasher flick blush. From 1978 to 1986, the Consumer Product Safety Commission tallied 6,100 emergency room visits—81% of the victims were under 15, half under 10, with most injuries to the head, face, eyes, or ears, leaving kids with permanent scars, blindness, brain damage, the works. Three kids didn’t make it out alive—a 4-year-old, a 7-year-old, and a 13-year-old, their lives snuffed out by a game that was supposed to be fun but turned into a tragedy when a dart went astray, piercing a skull with the force of 23,000 pounds per square inch, according to one researcher’s estimate. The tipping point came in 1987, when David Snow’s 7-year-old daughter, Michelle, took a dart to the brain in her own front yard, thrown by a neighbor kid who didn’t know any better. Snow went on a one-man crusade, hounding the CPSC until they banned the sale of Lawn Darts outright on December 19, 1988, urging parents to destroy their sets and keep them away from kids. Canada followed in 1989, and just like that, the Jarts® were gone, relegated to the black market of flea markets and yard sales, where they still lurk like forbidden fruit, tempting the brave and the stupid.

Now, I’m not saying those injuries and deaths weren’t heartbreaking—because they were, and I’m not a complete monster—but let’s talk about why it’s time to lift the ban and bring back Lawn Darts in all their perilous glory. We’re 37 years past that 1988 ban (which is personally unbelievable…seems like just yesterday), and in that time, we’ve raised generations of the softest, most coddled kids this planet has ever seen, kids who’ve never known a world without safety nets, both literal and metaphorical, who’ve been swaddled in so much bubble wrap they can’t even handle a scraped knee without a therapy session and a participation trophy. These snowflakes have grown into adults who are terrified of their own shadows, who’d rather sip oat milk lattes and whine about microaggressions than face the raw, unfiltered reality of life. They’re clogging up society with their weakness, their endless need for validation, their inability to take a risk and survive the consequences, and frankly, there are too damn many of them. We need to thin the herd, and I don’t mean that in some dystopian, eugenics-fueled fever dream—I mean it in the primal, Darwinian sense that says if you’re too dumb to dodge a Lawn Dart, maybe you’re not cut out for the long haul.

Bringing back Lawn Darts isn’t just about nostalgia; it’s about restoring a sense of toughness, of resilience, of living life on the edge and not crying to the government to save you when things go south. We’ve got trampolines killing 11 people between 2000 and 2009, skateboards claiming 40 lives a year, swimming pools drowning 390 kids annually, and hot dogs choking far more children under 14 than Lawn Darts ever did—yet we don’t ban those, because we understand that life comes with risks, and mitigating them is on us, not some faceless bureaucrat. The CPSC’s ban was a knee-jerk reaction, a capitulation to a culture that’s forgotten how to let kids be kids, to let adults be adults, to let us all take responsibility for our own goddamn choices. Lawn Darts taught us that—taught us to be careful, to be aware, to respect the danger and still have a blast, because what’s the point of living if you’re not willing to tempt fate every once in a while?

So here’s my demand, you pencil-pushing cowards at the CPSC: lift the ban on Lawn Darts, effective immediately, and let us badasses reclaim our birthright. Let us toss those metal-tipped beauties across the lawn again, let us feel the adrenaline of a near miss, let us laugh in the face of danger and teach the next generation what it means to be alive. The snowflakes can stay inside with their iPads and their safe spaces—we’ll be out back, playing a real game, thinning the herd one ill-aimed throw at a time. Because if we don’t toughen up this society, if we don’t reintroduce a little chaos into the mix, we’re doomed to a future of mediocrity, and I, for one, would rather go down swinging with a Lawn Dart in my hand than live in a world that boring.

N.P.: “Girl U Want” – Robert Palmer