For playful print platform of Washington City Paper, I wrote about the government’s War on Toy Guns.

I knew D.C’s laws controlling real guns are going lax. But until recently I wasn’t aware that federal and local statutes and various regulatory pressures have made it harder to get cap and squirt guns and air rifles and various other types of faux firearms.

D.C. is among the most restrictive jurisdictions in the country as far as toy guns go, with sales of Airsoft air guns banned in the city, and out-of-state sellers prohibited from shipping the realistically ominous-looking playthings into our town.

Rather than deal with the legal headaches, many big retail chains across the country, including Walmart and Target, stopped selling look-a-like toy guns, and now brag about their reduced inventory.

Walmart, the biggest retail kahuna, which has been doing a kabuki dance with D.C. that’ll eventually end with a new outpost somewhere in our midst, had also backed away from selling real firearms in recent years.

But a report this spring in the Wall Street Journal said the chain has gone back to offering actual weapons.

From the WSJ piece:

The world’s largest retailer stopped selling hunting rifles and bullets at all but a third of its U.S. stores five years ago, citing diminishing sales. It is now restoring them to hundreds of locations, bringing the total to nearly half of its more than 3,600 U.S. namesake stores, as part of a larger push to restore “heritage categories” of merchandise such as fishing rods and bolts of sewing fabric that it removed in an attempt to go upscale that backfired.