As to the DuraCoat line, while there are a number of "electric" colors, there are many other colors, including camo, colors that match many "traditional" colors that could be used for many customizations and historic replicas, none of which have anything to do with making a gun look like a toy. If you wanted to make a gun look like a toy, there are many options available to a criminal that are much easier and cheaper. At a minimum, to do a proper job DuraCoating a gun in one of the electric line, you need about $25 of the DuraCoat product, and an air brush and the accompanying equipment. A better job requires bead blasting and parkerizing (Second Snowflakes in Hell reference, DuraCoat Process). A can of Krylon costs about $5. Orange electrical tape to wrap around the muzzle costs about $.95. Furthermore, what about the people that use a magic marker to make a toy gun look real? Time to ban Sharpies!

Is there a legitimate use for electric colors other than offending the easily offended? I have seen rifles make for adults with purple furniture. In training scenarios that include real firearms, there are times that the added visibility is a benefit. People, including law enforcement, working in an environment where they could become separated from their weapon, could also benefit from the visibility. Many competitive shooters (men and women), including the US Shooting Team that competes internationally including the Olympics, like to paint their guns all sorts of colors.

As to police, as I have said in the past, a suspect that is appears to be threatening an officer with a weapon should be engaged accordingly. A person who gets shot because they point an AirSoft gun, squirt gun, or painted real gun at an officer is completely at fault for whatever happens to them at that point.

In the end, this is about attacking the gun industry. We have seen attacks on guns that are too black, now that are too colorful. All this is aimed at an end-state of eliminating guns. Throwing this very useful product under the bus is counterproductive to the firearms community as a whole.

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 link  

A Wisconsin company that disguises deadly firearms with bright paints and camouflage has a new target: Mayor Bloomberg. 

Lauer Custom Weaponry, whose products were banned in the city in 2006 because they make dangerous guns look like innocent toys, is taunting the anti-gun mayor with a line of paints named "The Bloomberg Collection."

The company - which named its purple hue after Barney, the dinosaur beloved by toddlers - is peddling a rainbow of candy-colored paints for each of the five boroughs. 

There's red for Manhattan, rose for the Bronx, blue for Brooklyn, green for Queens and orange for Staten Island. 

And as an extra slap - a stencil of the mayor's face for the barrel of the gun.

Gun owners also can plunk down $129 for a "Bloomberg Collection EZ Camo Kit" to pimp out their semiautomatics and rifles with a brick wall and graffiti decoration. 

It's no joke. 

An outraged Bloomberg called gun-coloration kits "a tragedy in the making." 

"Making a quick buck by coloring a handgun to look like a toy is craven and beneath any honest businessman," Bloomberg told the Daily News. "By coloring these guns, a real one looks like a toy, and a police officer won't be able to tell the difference." 

"Imagine an officer who comes upon a teenager pointing a pink gun into a crowd. If the gun is a toy, an innocent teenager may be killed - and others, too." 

Our police officers have a hard enough job as it is, and that's why we passed a law to prevent these deadly tragedies from occurring." 

It's just the latest time Bloomberg has come under fire from the weapons industry for his efforts to shut down New York's illegal gun trade. 

Last year, a Virginia gun shop held a "Bloomberg raffle" - with the prize a brand-new gun - to protest the mayor's crackdown on stores he says are illegally peddling firearms that end up on New York streets. 

Not to be left out, the National Rifle Association soon plastered a picture of Bloomberg as an octopus on the cover of its magazine. 

This time, Bloomberg angered Steve Lauer, owner of Lauer Custom Weaponry, when he pushed through a law that punishes anyone who uses, buys or sells a gun-coloration kit in New York with a year in jail or a $1,000 fine. 

"The mayor picked us out as being the pink-gun guys," said Toby Johnson, who described himself as Lauer's "right-hand man" at the Chippewa Falls company. 

The bright paints were meant to help rescue workers and range masters locate guns more easily - not fool cops, Johnson said. They regularly sell the colors named after the boroughs and have even sold "five or six" Bloomberg camo kits, Johnson said. 

Women also are big fans of the colors, he added. 

"The ladies like it. They fashion their guns after their clothing," Johnson said. 

But at least one woman was angered by the "shameful ploy" and "disgraceful marketing." 

"In the hands of a child, a real gun made to look like a toy has deadly consequences," said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan).

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The line that gets me is: "Imagine an officer who comes upon a teenager pointing a pink gun into a crowd If the gun is a toy, an innocent teenager may be killed - and others, too." Pretty simple to me, a teenager pointing a potential weapon at a crown is not innocent. An officer should assume a weapon is real, and engage accordingly. Typical gun banners, blame the object, not the people. 

And what about magic markers? You could make a FAKE gun look REAL!!!  

You know what the next step after banning bright guns is: Ban dark guns! They are too easy to hide!   

Kudos to Steve and the rest of LCW, it is great to see someone take on this foolishness. 

Tired of drab gunmetal blue and black dominating your arsenal? Do a fashion makeover on your weaponry with The Bloomberg Collection of designer gun paints and camouflage.

Wisconsin-based Lauer Custom Weaponry is honoring our hoplophobic mayor with a line of brightly colored paints for each of the 5 boroughs -- Manhattan red, Bronx rose, Brooklyn blue, Queens green, and Staten Island orange. They even include a stencil of Mayor Mike's face for the barrel of the gun.

If urban camouflage is more your taste, Lauer also offers the Bloomberg Collection EZ Camo Kit with a brick-wall-and-graffiti motif for only $129.

Not surprisingly, our ingrateful mayor doesn't appreciate the tribute. "By coloring these guns, a real one looks like a toy, and a police officer won't be able to tell the difference," the mayor huffed.

That's the same excuse Bloomberg and his nanny-state allies used in 2003, when they tried to ban all toy guns from New York City -- until the Manhattan Libertarian Party rode to the rescue.

Of course, it's a total urban myth that cops are shooting innocent kids because they mistake toy guns for real ones. There's been exactly one documented incident in NYC since 1994 of a truly innocent child playing with a toy gun and mistakenly being shot. That was in the case of a deaf child playing in a darkened hallway who couldn't hear the police order him to drop the weapon. The other "children being shot while playing with a toy gun" are inevitably gang-bangers using a fake gun to commit a real robbery.

On the other hand, the police do sometimes mistake a wallet or a cellphone for a gun, with deadly consequences, but so far they haven't called for a ban on wallets and cellphones.

As of 2006, anyone who uses, buys or sells a gun-coloration kit in New York faces a year in jail or a $1,000 fine.

Here's a modest proposal: How about the police refrain from shooting their own guns until they have positively identified a lethal threat? And by threat I don't mean the mere presence of something that may or may not be a gun. Like say, oh I don't know, a gun barrel pointed at person, the suspect refusing an order to drop the weapon pointed at a person, or bullets emerging from the barrel.