Toys guns are becoming popular with Chinese youth despite China's strict gun-control laws. Illustration: Chen Xia/GT

The boy took aim at my son with his six-shooter and pulled the trigger. "Pchoow, pchoow!" the Chinese onomatopoeia for "bang bang," rang out across the Shanghai park as the boy and his comrades, no more than 8 year-old and each armed with a toy gun, fired imaginary shots. My son - who is just 3 year-old and until that moment had never before seen a gun let alone had one pointed at him - began crying. The lads ran off laughing and continued their shootout elsewhere.

That's how firearm fetishism starts: with fear. Minutes later, spotting an elderly peasant fellow selling trinkets out of a wooden pull-cart, my son grabbed a 10-yuan plastic pistol just like the boys had and pleaded to buy it. When we refused he cried even louder. My wife and I knew then that the first salvo in what is surely to be our long war against toy guns had just been fired.

As an expatriate parent in China, where private ownership of firearms is forbidden, I argue that local children have no need for toy guns. Unlike their trigger-happy Western counterparts, who glamorize gunplay as a means of coping with the violence of their respective society - violence that China by comparison lacks - such toys are obsolete here and thus should be equally outlawed. The next time my boy plays in a Shanghai park, he shouldn't have to face a firing squad.

More than any other reason, what I most like about raising a family in China is its distinctly low violent crime rate. Having lived here for over a decade, I can attest that there are very few neighborhoods that man, woman or child can walk along day or night feeling that their safety is threatened. Of course I'm not talking about missing manhole covers or maniac drivers or trash being thrown out of windows, which in urban China are common hazards to anyone strolling down a sidewalk. But as far as being physically attacked or robbed by a stickup man, it seldom happens.

Back in 2007, I wrote an article for Beijing Review titled "Keeping a Lid on Crime" where I mentioned a few instances I'd had, whilst backpacking across China, being accosted by riffraff. But I concluded optimistically that, due to a variety of factors including constant police surveillance and severe criminal sentencing (the world's most active use of capital punishment, including for non-violent and economic offenses), "China remains one of the statistically safest countries to visit, and the rest of the world would do well to take notice."

I stand by those words today. At that time, Xinhua News Agency had reported that there were twice as many reported criminal cases in 2005 than in 1990, and six times that of 1980. Ten years on, overall crime in China is still on a steady uptick, but the Ministry of Public Security's (MPS) annual crime report statistics come bundled with financial and cyber crimes, which are currently all the rage. Violence, however, remains comparatively low and, according to MPS, is on a year-on-year downswing.

A top Chinese security official also announced at a 2015 Central Committee meeting that China's homicide rate was just 0.7 per 100,000 residents in 2014 (compare this with 3.8 per 100,000 in the US). He was quoted as saying there has been "a consistent fall" in violent crimes such as rape, abduction and murder. Other sources, including CIA World Factbook and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, rank China near the middle or last of all nations in terms of violent crimes and homicide.

Bang bang, that awful sound

China's low crime stats can probably be attributed to the country's strict gun control laws. The sale and private ownership of guns is unlawful here, and the manufacturing of conventional small arms for export is restricted to just 11 authorized State-owned enterprises.

With the high-profile exception of Liu Han, "the gun-slinging CEO from Sichuan," who was charged with multiple murders in 2014, Chinese criminals generally do not carry guns (CIA World Factbook ranks China at the bottom 90th global percentile for crimes involving guns). Underground gunrunning seizures are frequently foiled, the most notable being millionaire gun trafficker Fang Lei's arrest in 2012. The very few who do commit gun-related crimes and are caught often get a taste of their own bullet unless the courts spare them with a life sentence.

Meanwhile in America, my home country, news feeds are congested with daily reports of gun-related crimes (30,088 reported shootings in 2015, 372 mass shootings and 64 school shootings), many involving teens intoxicated on a hyper-violent cocktail of first-person-shooter computer games, Hollywood movies and wild, wild west 'Muricanism. At least once a year there will occur some tragic campus massacre ending with dead bodies everywhere. American politicians suddenly pretend to care and promise to rewrite gun legislation. But because these same lawmakers are beholden to the financial contributions of US gun lobbyists, by the next election cycle guns are inexplicably no longer an issue.

Conversely, in China, there are no domestic gun lobbyists. Politicians here strive to keep the streets safe and strictly surveyed, and, as such, provincial police rarely carry sidearms. There are some exceptions, especially along China's southern borders in Guangdong Province due to the persistence of drug traffickers. In 2014, 1,000 vetted Shanghai beat-patrol officers were issued service revolvers following a spate of domestic separatist attacks elsewhere in the country. But the new policy forbids them from unholstering their guns except in the most dire cases. And, of course, People's Armed Police units are always on standby for riots, terrorist attacks or other national emergencies.

Even on Chinese TV serials, crimes are solved by detectives who rely more on tech surveillance rather than guns to catch the bad guys, whereas on American television police procedurals, hardboiled cops just shoot the perp, walk away and cut to credits. Sadly, those programs are a direct reflection of America's rising police state, where law enforcement officers brandish their sidearms, Quick Draw McGraw-like, for the smallest infraction.

The Counted, a news-aggregated database compiled by The Guardian of deadly force committed by US law enforcement, shows that 1,146 civilians were shot and killed by cops in 2015, 229 of them unarmed. That is 80 times the rate of any other developed nation. Thus far in 2016, over 400 Americans have been killed by cops, 40 unarmed. China, whose population is over four times the US, certainly has its share of police brutality, especially by chengguan, deputized street-level urban enforcers. But in 2014 only 12 civilian deaths by Chinese cops were recorded, according to multiple media sources. In 2015, just six (excluding terrorist incidents).

Wa da da dang, listen to my 9mm

Though unproven and often disputed, some experts believe there is a direct correlation between the US crime rate and the fact that American culture has a long love affair with gunplay.

From pantomiming cops-'n-robbers (where the game always ends with the robber being shot) to idolizing Eazy-E, guns are a boys-will-be-boys right of passage in the West.

Chinese culture, despite having invented gun powder in the 9th century, has no such history of glorifying gunslingers. Swords have always been the weapon of choice in Chinese folklore, which may explain why mass stabbings, as opposed to mass shootings, are a thing here. But the chances of walking away alive from a slashing are much higher than taking a bullet.

With so few firearms in Chinese culture, the emergence of toy guns, a growing phenomenon, is all the more inexplicable. A decade ago, when I was a schoolteacher in Beijing, playing with kids after school and perusing toy stores for prizes to hand out to them were among my compulsory pastimes. Toy guns were a sight unseen, as was the classic 'point your finger and thumb like a gun' game. Conversely, crossing one's hands like Ultraman and firing imaginary specium rays caused all kinds of schoolyard havoc.

According to the 1996 Law of the People's Republic of China on Firearms Control adopted by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, "Imitation guns are prohibited by law from being manufactured or sold." This includes weapon-grade replicas. But children's toy guns, which range from cartoonishly florescent to hyper-realistic, are a gunmetal-gray area in China's anti-gun policy and thus looked at the other way by local-level authorities.

Indeed, browsing the hundreds of listings of any of China's numerous toy supplier portals such as Guangdong Toy Association, China Toy Expo, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) or Alibaba, it's clear that imitation guns are hardly prohibited from being made in the mainland.

Shantou Chenghai Runki Toys Trading Company, for example, produces a "very realistic look of the Super AK47 gun." Chenghai Fu Qi Plastic Machining Factory sells a "toy revolver with a realistic appearance." Ningbo Baodi Toys Technology Co., Ltd. makes a solid-wood 9mm that, if painted black, could easily pass as a lethal weapon.

Many are export-only companies, and emails to them by the Global Times confirmed that "we are not allowed to sell in the Chinese mainland" due to not having been issued a CCC (China Compulsory Certificate), a safety seal for certain regulated products sold in the Chinese market. However, as one Hong Kong-based export agent of cap guns hinted at in their reply to our queries, some overstock of non-compliant toys tends to "find its way into small, local stores." This suggests not only a lack of 3C enforcement but also newly-active distribution chains within the mainland.

In Shanghai, where I now reside with my family, toy guns have been making their appearance with a vengeance.

Toy aunties who peddle trinkets at family-friendly parks now carry neon-hued water pistols at their hips like Clint Eastwood with Chinese Characteristics. Same with those old timers who pull around carts filled with household wares, among which are cap guns for the kiddies. The stationary store located next to our neighborhood primary school sells carbine submachine gun model kits. The other day a little girl, no older than one and wearing buttless baby pants, was weeble-wobbling in our community garden with a replica Vityaz-SN in her little hands.

Boom biddy bye bye

To be clear, as far as Second Amendment rights back in the US, I'm neutral. I personally do not wish to own a gun; the only real firearm I have ever used was a .22 caliber rimfire rifle at a Boy Scout summer camp when I was 14. But I can see how, with so many illegally-obtained gun-toting criminals on the rampage in American cities (which, vicious circle-style, gives the police further excuse to act as executioners), citizens feel that they should continue to have the right to arm themselves.

Despite the ever-rising rate of gun-related crimes and deaths in the US, toy gun sales are, for the first time in 150 years, on an incongruous decline. The American toy industry is reporting lackluster sales of anything resembling a handgun or assault rifle in urban retail outlets. Analysts attribute this to the frequency of police killing children who they mistakenly believed to be wielding real guns, which occurred 13 times in the US in 2015, according to a comprehensive report of fatal police shootings by the Washington Post.

Conversely, in China, a news archive search for police shootings of children in the past decade produces not a single reported case. But now that some urban Chinese cops are armed, it may be only a matter of time before one mistakes little Meimei's replica Vityaz-SN for the real thing.

As toys are supposed to serve as an expressive medium between children and the culture in which they live, then the hyper-aggressive behavior of American youth demonstrates that there may in fact be a causal connection between societal violence and firearm fetishism.

But if there is already a law on the books robustly outlawing not just real guns in China but also replicas, then what purpose does the normalization of toy guns for children, however real or unreal they may look, serve in a low-crime society that has absolutely no gun culture?

If the Chinese government can so impressively restrict the manufacture and sale of real guns, then I'd think that shutting down the local distribution channels of toy gun assembly lines in Guangdong would be a cinch. For should China want to keep its immaculate violent crime rate among the lowest in the world - an unconditional deal-breaker for me and most long-term expat parents here - and continue to discourage the desire for private ownership of hand weapons, the very last thing it should be doing is whetting the appetites of its youngest generations for the feel of gunmetal.