Boys will always be boys. Before guns they made pretend swords out of sticks. Before swords they made clubs. The invention of the gun presented unique challenges to boys the world over. My attempts at building a gun involved a lot of elastic and usually ended up being inefficient crossbows. Kids today have it easy. They just walk into a store (or Amazon.com) and buy a nerf gun.

Back in 1941 Modern Mechanix published instructions on how to build the ultimate boys toy, a “Repeating Action Submachine Gun”. When I was a kid I would have given anything to have one of these!

[ Many thanks to Mason for emailing us the link. ]