Most boys in the 1970s played with toy guns regardless of whether they were from Uptown or a suburb. This boy from Alaska took it a step further. He made his own rubber band gun out of a 2×2, a nail, a rubber band, and a clothes pin. It shot pop tops hard enough to break a window or skin. My impression of him was that he was extremely resourceful, but I worried that he might hurt someone with the gun. There were several gangs in Uptown at the time. Perhaps this was his idea of self-defense. A report by the National Gang Crime Research Center indicates that the average Latin King in Chicago got his first real gun by age 12.
