It is the impracticality of these weapons, their purposeful malignancy and impetus to cause damage, that still gives me pause. It doesn’t fit the setting. You can’t just slice and dice in a cartoon! You can’t just start shooting wildly if you’re the hero! You can, Batman-style, bludgeon and cripple a thousand villains and skate by on the illusion of non-lethality, I suppose. But a bullet? You’re limited by the threat of death, of too much violence, of overkill. Smash a man’s face and he may live. Give a G.I. Joe a laser pistol and his or her enemies fall over in flurry of sparkly lights and scorched camouflage. Actual guns firing real bullets cannot be downplayed and will never, in the zeitgeist, come across as less than lethally efficient. They cannot be used in popular culture the way something like nunchucks or a quarterstaff or a fist can be used.

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