Guess What the Latest Kids' Gift Is?

Soldier Boy is pre-emptively buying archery equipment so he can start bow hunting in the desert when we move.  It's something he's wanted to do for a while (bow hunting, not necessarily in a desert climate) and he has the opportunity to get discounted gear now so he's taking it.  I'm simply biding my time.  I've always (at least since high school) wanted to learn to shoot with a bow and arrow but I'm more of a marksman type of person. We've already had the discussion.  I'll be staying home while he goes to kill us dinner.  Unless the apocalypse happens.  But that's a different story.

Anyway he dropped his newly acquired bow off yesterday to have it put together and he was talking to the guy doing it and the guy was telling him about the NEW MUST HAVE THING for kids lately.  He sold, like, a billion of them like he's never done before.  Can you guess what it is?

Yup.  A recurve bow.  As opposed to one of these guys, that Soldier Boy purchased, that you can scope out and redistributes weight for prolonged pull back and is obviously all sorts of modern and fancy.

Why are kids wetting themselves over recurve bows?

Oh yeah.  THE HUNGER GAMES.  They want to shoot like Katniss!  And this is boys and girls.  Soldier Boy was saying a 15 year old boy was in there trying out a bow while he was there (a little unsuccessfully since the draw weight was a smidge too much for the kid).  But the sales guy has made a direct correlation of an increase in recurve bow sales for children thanks to the likes of THE HUNGER GAMES.

I think that's pretty neat!  Gets them outside, teaches them a lesson in patience and should the zombie apocalypse happen we'll have a whole generation of Daryls ready, willing and able to bring the smackdown on the undead masses.

You can fire a recurve bow, you can aim a crossbow.

I'm sure some people would be all like, "OMG that's so dangerous!  Will someone think of the children!"  And I'd be all like, you're dumb.  And you probably don't let your own children handle dinner knives for the sake of their safety.  Personally I'd rather have a kid that's willing to breath fresh air and learn something that's rightly an art than sucking Cheetos in front of a video game for 12 hour clips.  Can kids shoot each other with arrows?  Of course.  But have you SEEN YouTube?  Kids don't need anything anywhere near as sophisticated as a bow and arrow to pwn themselves.