Don’t Shoot Me. These Handcuffs Keep Falling Off.

As a final attempt to keep me locked up, they tried to get me thrown into immigration jail.

I was in the back seat of an NBI vehicle leaving Pampanga and heading to immigration in Manila. They put me in handcuffs for the drive, which seemed like a reasonable enough precaution under the circumstances.

The problem was that the handcuffs kept falling off.

This put me in the strange position of being responsible for notifying the people holding me prisoner that I was no longer properly restrained.

“Don’t shoot me. These handcuffs keep falling off.”

Then we’d deal with the handcuffs again, and eventually they’d fall off again. I wasn’t trying to escape, and I especially wasn’t interested in looking like I was trying to escape while sitting in the back seat of a vehicle with armed people who presumably expected me to remain handcuffed. So I kept reporting the equipment failure.

At some point during the drive, the cuffs started to look familiar. They were basically kid handcuffs.

Not metaphorically. They looked like the little metal handcuffs children used to play with, the kind that came with a couple of tiny keys and maybe a sheriff’s badge or a toy gun so you could arrest your brother, your friend, the kid next door, or whoever else had committed whatever crime you had just made up.

And because this was apparently where my mind went while I was being hauled toward Manila, I started imagining that there had been some massive program where we shipped all our extra kid handcuffs to the Philippines and they got distributed to law enforcement.

The whole thing was so fucking absurd that I couldn’t stop laughing.

The guys in the front didn’t find this nearly as funny as I did. They kept getting more irritated because I was sitting in the back laughing for no apparent reason. I wasn’t about to explain it to them.

“Sorry. I just thought of something funny.”

Why the hell did we give children handcuffs?

A toy police car makes sense. So does a badge. But at some point somebody looked at an actual device designed for restraining another human being and decided what children really needed was a smaller version.

Apparently, people have been working on that problem for almost a hundred years. In 1928, Theodore John Hoglund filed a patent application for a toy handcuff that could lock around the wrist of a child but could also be released by the child without a key. He described it as an improvement on another toy-handcuff application he had filed in 1927.

So by 1927, someone wasn’t merely making toy handcuffs. Someone was already improving them.

That makes sense, because there is one fairly obvious problem with giving handcuffs to children: children lose keys.

This apparently remained an engineering challenge. A 1969 patent titled “Secret Release Handcuffs” described toy cuffs that worked with a key but also included a hidden release so a child couldn’t accidentally stay locked in them.

What I love about all of this is that nobody appears to have been asking whether children needed handcuffs. That question had already been settled. The question was how to make better ones.

It probably made perfect sense at the time because handcuffs weren’t really being sold to children as restraint devices. They were part of being the sheriff. Kids played cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, soldiers, outlaws and lawmen. By the middle of the twentieth century, television was pumping Westerns into American homes constantly. By 1959, around 30 Westerns were airing on prime-time television.

You weren’t giving a kid a device for depriving another human being of his liberty. You were completing the outfit.

I understand that logic because it never seemed strange to me either. Toy handcuffs were just a thing that existed, right there with cap guns and plastic army men and all the other equipment we needed to spend an afternoon shooting, arresting and killing one another before somebody’s mother called us home for dinner.

What surprised me more was finding out that toy handcuffs never really went away. You can still buy metal handcuffs for kids. Not some soft plastic thing that vaguely resembles handcuffs. Metal ones. Keys. Working locks. Safety releases. There are still versions being sold specifically for children, including sets advertised as being made from “real metal.”

So apparently society reconsidered a lot of childhood toys over the years and landed on: handcuffs are fine. And maybe they are.

Mostly, I just find it funny that generations of adults have put considerable thought into making handcuffs safe for children. Make them look real. Make them lock. Give the kid a key. But for God’s sake, make sure they can’t accidentally stay handcuffed.

Which brings me back to that drive from Pampanga to Manila. Toy manufacturers figured this out nearly a century ago. The goal was to make handcuffs convincing enough to feel real while making absolutely certain the person wearing them could get out.

The NBI had apparently gone one step further. You didn’t even need the safety release.

I just wish somebody had told the guys with the guns.

Did you have toy handcuffs—or some other completely normal childhood toy that seems insane when you look at it now? Let us know through the contact page.