I've loved toy guns since I was a kid. I think they have positive aesthetic qualities. You could argue all day about the questionable taste of regarding a gun as an art object, but the fact of the market is that sexier-looking guns sell better, and besides, archaic weapons such as swords are commonly regarded and traded as art objects today, despite the fact that their purpose, in their day, was no less abhorrent than that of a shotgun. One could even argue that a sword is morally uglier than a shotgun; after all, no one hunts with a sword. Ray guns, in particular, are highly fanciful. Their purpose is to stimulate the imagination. It is perhaps unfortunate that real firearms are looking more and more like ray guns every day, but I'm not going to lose my interest in ray guns and what they represent because of it.
