Lawn Darts: The Toy America Banned Like a Weapon (And What a Set Is Worth Now)

The Hazard Files — Case No. 001

For three decades America sold its children a foot-long steel-tipped projectile and called it a backyard game. Then the government did something it almost never does to a toy: it banned it outright. The sets that survived are now some of the strangest collectibles in the country — legal to own, illegal to sell, and worth real money anyway.

A Roman weapon, reissued for the patio

The lawn dart is not really a toy that went wrong. It is a weapon that got remarketed. The Roman army carried the plumbata — a short, lead-weighted throwing dart that legionaries lobbed overhand in an arc so it came down point-first. Any collector who has held a vintage Jart has felt the resemblance: a weighted metal head, a steel shaft about a quarter inch thick tapering to a point, plastic fins at the rear for stable flight, roughly twelve inches long and between a quarter and a half pound in the hand. Thrown high, it lands exactly the way the legion intended.

The postwar version turned that ballistics problem into a lawn game. Players stood about 35 feet apart and tossed the darts underhand toward a plastic ring lying on the grass — closest to the ring scores, a dart inside it scores more. The dominant brand, Jarts, became the generic name the way Kleenex did, and the industry filled in behind it: Hasbro patented its own version in 1970 (U.S. patent 3,672,678, a design that proposed molded plastic to bring manufacturing costs down), Canada's Irwin Toys followed with another in 1976, and names like Crown and "Missile Game" turned up on boxes across two decades of department store shelves.

The pitch was family fun. The physics was a half-pound steel spike falling out of the sky.

1970: the government knew, and blinked

Here is the detail most retellings skip: lawn darts were nearly banned eighteen years before they were banned. In 1970 the FDA, which then handled hazardous products, classified sharp-pointed lawn darts as a mechanical hazard. Consumers Union petitioned for an outright ban and lost in federal court. The dart makers — led by R.B. Jarts, Inc., which litigated to stay in business — accepted a compromise instead. Lawn darts could stay on the market if they carried a warning label about serious injury, included instructions to keep bystanders and animals out of the field of play, and — critically — were not sold in toy stores or toy departments.

That last condition was the whole ballgame, and it failed completely. Lawn darts were bundled into combination sets with badminton and volleyball, stacked in sporting goods aisles ten feet from the toy section, and sold by the millions to families who never read the label. The regulation assumed a wall between "sporting equipment for adults" and "things children play with." Anyone who grew up in the 1970s knows exactly how sturdy that wall was.

April 5, 1987

On an April afternoon in Riverside, California, a playmate of Michele Snow's brother threw a lawn dart that came down in the front yard where the seven-year-old was playing. It penetrated her skull. She was pronounced clinically dead three days later.

Her father, David Snow, was an aerospace engineer at Hughes Aircraft, and he responded like one — with data, persistence, and a refusal to accept the premise. "I want to get these damned darts," he said. "These things killed my child. If I don't do anything, it's just a matter of time before someone else gets killed." He met with an assistant to President Reagan and with three CPSC commissioners. When the commission's staff first suggested the injury record amounted to a couple dozen cases, the deeper accounting told a different story.

What the record actually showed	Figure
Emergency room visits from lawn darts, 1980–1988	6,100
Estimated ER-treated injuries per year	~670
Victims aged 15 or younger	81%
Victims aged 10 or younger	roughly half
Injuries to the head, face, eye, or ear	57%
Deaths on record — children aged 4, 7, and 13	3

Against a product whose entire function was recreation, those numbers ended the argument. Congress passed its own lawn dart prohibition on October 21, 1988. The CPSC voted its final ban a week later, on October 28 — two commissioners in favor, one abstaining. The ban took effect December 19, 1988, and lawn darts came off American shelves the week before Christmas. Canada banned them in July 1989, after at least 55 serious injuries of its own.

What a set is worth now

The legal position is genuinely odd. Owning lawn darts is legal in the United States. Selling them is not — the ban in 16 CFR Part 1306 covers every pointed lawn dart, new or secondhand, and has never been lifted. In Canada even secondhand sales are explicitly illegal under the Hazardous Products Act. eBay prohibits lawn dart listings outright. The modern sets sold legally at big-box stores are a different product: blunt-tipped, weighted plastic, designed to fall outside the regulation's definition.

None of which has stopped a gray market, because nothing raises a collectible's temperature like the word "banned." Common, played-with sets — darts worn, box gone or rough — are reported changing hands privately in the $60 to $200 range. The top of the market is condition-driven, like everything else in vintage: a circa-1980s mint-in-box Regent Jarts set realized $523 at Esquis Auctions in Chicago, and at a September 2026 sale at Kruse Auctions a boxed Jarts Missile Game stood at $400 with bidding open while a Crown lawn darts set was offered at $200. Some regional auction houses will run the lots; the national marketplaces will not, and that scarcity of venues is itself part of the price.

Reading a set, if one surfaces in your family's garage

• Count to four and two. A standard set is four darts and two target rings. Complete sets command the premium; singles and partial sets trade at a steep discount.
• The box does the heavy lifting. As with most banned or discontinued products, packaging is the hard part to find — it is what separates a $60 set from a $400 one. Period-correct printing, price stickers, and retailer stamps all help.
• Check for ringers of the wrong kind. Replacement and reproduction darts circulate, and they get mixed into original boxes. Compare tip construction, head material, and fin color across all four darts — a matched set matches.
• Brand matters at the margin. Jarts is the marquee name. Crown, Hasbro, and the various "missile game" sets are collected, but the brand that became the generic term carries the nostalgia premium.

The strangest shelf in American collecting

Every collecting category has its grail objects, but banned toys are their own peculiar genre — the only category where the government is the reason for the scarcity. Lawn darts sit at the top of it, alongside the other products history swears were fine, because they compress a whole American story into one cardboard box: thirty years of profitable denial, a warning label doing the work of a wall, one engineer who refused to let it go, and a Christmas-week disappearance from every shelf in the country.

If you find a set in grandpa's garage, you are holding all of that. Which is worth more than $200, even if you can never sell it.