Rising_Zan_Samurai_Gunman: trivial use of my dark powers: Buckyballs were specifically marketed for adults. If you're dumb enough to give them to your kids maybe removing the snowflakes from the gene pool is the right thing to do.

This. Just got some for myself while I still could, and there are multiple warnings that they are for adults only and are harmful if swallowed; at least 3 on the packaging. When you order from their website there is a big yellow warning that you must set a check box in stating that you will not give them to children or allow them to be left out near children.

Yeahbut, they sorta ab enticing haazrd. When I got mine I had a random thought that it would be a good idea to show the neighborhood toddlers how cool magnets are. Doh!

Surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet: The story behind Aqua Dots. This wasn't stupid kids, this was greedy adults.

Australian company comes up with brilliant idea of small beads that glue together when wetted. They used 1,5-pentanediol which was a perfectly safe chemical that acted as a glue when wetted. They contracted with a Chinese company to produce the dots. Said owners of Chinese company, "Why not use 1,4-butanediol? It's much, much cheaper and has the same gluing effect."

1,4 butanediol is metabolized by the body into GHB, a recreational drug.

/Aqua Dots are back on the market under the name Pixos and uses 1,5-pentanediol and bitrex.

MelGoesOnTour: And now that I think about it....are "caps" still available for sale? That is, those things you could either put in a cap-gun or smash the whole wad with a hammer and start a fire?

Yes they are. I saw some for the first time in a VERY long time at a store a couple of weeks ago. The paper roll ones... five rolls all together in a tiny box. Oh the memories. They had the plastic 'disk' ones too.

peasandcarrots: A few times, when I've mentioned to friends that we had lawn darts, they look at me like I'm lucky to be alive. Then someone said, "Aren't you supposed to play catch with them?"

Lawn darts. Catch.

"No, there's a ring you put on the ground. You're supposed to throw it into the ring. You don't play catch with darts, as far as I know."

"Oh..."

The weird thing is, I've started seeing that show up in a few articles and even in a book or two - that lawn darts were for playing catch. I think people have heard about the dangers of lawn darts for so long that they started presuming the toy was dangerous as designed, rather than a toy with unforeseen risks for people who used them improperly.

Our lawn darts looked like http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Lawndarts.jpg. Note the squared-off point. You might get a hell of a bruise, but I doubt that thing could pierce anything. Not unless you dropped it from a cloud.

Yea, they started out with a dull(ish) point but by the time they'd been played with a few (hundred) hours and they had glanced a few rocks, you could have some pretty dirty sharp(ish) points on there. It was kinda like horse shoes in that there were two ring targets you would set up at opposite ends of the yard. Eventually you would just stay at your end as the darts rained down around you and the target...
I took one in the foot about 40 years ago, and despite my best efforts to the contrary, and a nasty infected puncture wound, I did get to keep my foot...
So I was probably one of the kids responsible for the end of lawn darts.

Last summer I went to a XXXXX sale in XXXXX and found a set of Jarts sitting on top of a coat rack. Knowing (based on Fark threads) that these things are "banned" and have a market, I picked 'em up. Apparently they were on top of the coat rack because somebody told the sale organizers they were "illegal." Being an out-of-towner, I promised to forget where I got 'em.

$2.

Hanging on to them for now (they're in the original red white and blue cardboard box).

CSB:

When my son was about 6 I took him to Ringling Bros. circus. He bought a little plastic cannon that shot a little soft foam man about 2 inches tall. He had a little plastic helmet; the whole projectile weighed only a few grams.

No. 1 Son was downstairs playing with it when he suddenly yelled "Daddy! I broke off my tooth!"

The inside corner of one of his top two front teeth was indeed broken off about halfway up and halfway across. He swore the projectile had hit him in the mouth.

I didn't believe him at first. The cannon was cocked to fire by pulling down a little lever on the side; it was a pretty stiff spring and I thought he'd tried to use his teeth to pull on it.

But I found the broken-off piece and the little cannonball guy -- the tooth fragment had a little smear of red paint on it and the little (red) plastic helmet had a chip of red paint missing.

Our dentist said he'd seen kids chip their teeth on marshmallow nougat candy bars; he wasn't surprised.

/no, I didn't sue

The Southern Dandy: [www.retroland.com image 650x300]

Now with NEW Super brain cell killing fumes!

SuperElasticBubblePlastic doesn't kill brain cells... I made at least potato of those things.

twofedoras:
Kinder Eggs.

Fisher Price "My first drug smuggling" kit?

Rising_Zan_Samurai_Gunman: Mugato: I don't know, some of those don't seem unreasonable to ban.

trivial use of my dark powers: Buckyballs were specifically marketed for adults. If you're dumb enough to give them to your kids maybe removing the snowflakes from the gene pool is the right thing to do.

This. Just got some for myself while I still could, and there are multiple warnings that they are for adults only and are harmful if swallowed; at least 3 on the packaging. When you order from their website there is a big yellow warning that you must set a check box in stating that you will not give them to children or allow them to be left out near children.

Of course, the sad thing is, the problem wasn't the expected toy ingestion hazard (namely, the two-year-old who puts everything in his mouth eating a handful of Buckyballs) but rather was rock-stupid teenagers and tweens who were using them as faux tongue and lip piercings...and accidentally swallowing them in the process.

Buckyballs are a legitimate case of where some clinically derptarded individuals got a cool toy functionally banned :P

(As for the book bans--that's more of a case where old books did get caught up in some major tightening up of lead standards (when the Chinese were selling lead-fortified toys)--unfortunately, the level that things had to be lowered to in order to keep the cheap, cheerful and Chinese stuff out also managed to hit every book printed before 1978, back when lead was still routine in paints and inks.)