In the more modern era toy guns appeared, and in the nineteenth century toy guns began to proliferate, quickly becoming a thorny issue for parents, children, and the law.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.