By the time the Consumer Product Safety Commission finally acted, lawn darts had been quietly sending children to emergency rooms for years. The agency’s own 1987 warning was blunt: lawn darts “can cause serious or fatal head injuries,” according to the CPSC’s own news release that year. On May 25, 1988, the commission finally voted to ban the toy from sale nationwide, and by October of that same year the final rule was in place, backed by an act of Congress.

A Simple Backyard Game With a Deadly Flaw

Lawn darts were exactly what they sound like: weighted, metal-tipped darts that players tossed underhand toward a ring-shaped target staked into the grass. A dart designed to stick point-first into turf works exactly as intended whether it lands in the target ring or in a child’s skull, and lawn darts have no meaningful margin for a bad throw.

The Numbers Behind the Ban

The CPSC’s own accounting, cited in its 1987 warning, found that lawn darts had caused thousands of documented injuries and multiple deaths over the years the product remained on the market, with children disproportionately represented among the victims. The agency had actually required warning labels on lawn dart packaging years earlier. It didn’t work.

The Vote, Then the Law

The CPSC’s May 25, 1988 vote approved a ban on lawn darts intended for consumer use. By that October, according to the commission’s final rule announcement, the ban had Congressional backing as well, giving it the weight of federal law.

The Ban That Didn’t Fully Stick

Banning a product from new retail sale doesn’t make every existing set disappear from garages and closets overnight. The CPSC found it necessary to reissue its lawn dart warning in 1997, nearly a decade after the original ban, after another documented injury involving an old, pre-ban set that had simply never left a family’s yard equipment.

A Toy That Outlasted Its Own Ban

Lawn darts never came back as a mainstream retail product, and modern “safe” versions sold today use blunted plastic tips specifically engineered to avoid triggering the same regulatory category. But the original metal-tipped version remains one of the clearest examples in American consumer-safety history of a genuinely popular product getting pulled entirely from the market — not restricted, not relabeled, banned — because the underlying design simply couldn’t be made safe without stopping being the same toy.