12/18/03      Yet another angry rant.      Just don’t know what it is with me here lately.   Must be the Holidays or something.   Everything is setting me off.   Here’s my new beef.   Red Paintballs.    Man, a couple of years red paintballs were a rarity.    Because very few fields would allow you to shoot them.   Reason, in the rare event that someone might get hurt by a shot it made it difficult to assess how much bleeding might be occurring.   Because so few fields allowed them, many manufacturers stopped making red paintballs.    Many of us in the paintball community breathed a sigh of relief.    Last thing the sport needed was something to add to the perceived war aspect of the game.    Or for someone to get hit by a red paintball in a drive-by and think that they were gravely wounded.    That situation is bad enough when the paint is yellow, orange, or blue.    But at least then the victim will quickly figure out that they are not dying.   Now it seems that red paintballs are back on the market.   At a recent outing I purchased some supposedly tourney grade paint.    I was going to be playing my pump versus semis so I figured I would take every advantage I could get.    Well the paint sucked but that is a different rant.    And on top of sucking, the paint had red fill.    As the day progressed, I started handing the stuff out to a group of junior high kids that had shown up for a B-day party.    I began hearing two things I REALLY don’t like to hear.    "Cool it looks like blood!" or transversely "I think I’m bleeding."    Have paintball manufacturers lost their minds?    Or do they just simply not think about anything other than making a quick buck?    I’m sure there has been plenty of demand for red paint.    If I had a quarter for every time I’ve seen some Loser post something like " I always shoot Red ‘cause it looks like blood."    I could buy out the manufactures that make it and discontinue the stuff.    Anybody that thinks shooting red paint is cool needs to grow up.   And I hope that one of the manufacturers gets their butt sued off for ‘Undue Stress’ resulting from red paint being used in a drive-by.    It seems like that is what it takes to get them to think anymore.    You have to hit them where it hurts, right on their bottom line.    I could send them a nice letter expressing my concerns and I would no doubt receive some canned response to the effect of ‘Sorry, can’t do that, we are making money.’    Or at least that is what it would translate to.   They would probably use terms like ‘Due to reasons of economy’ or ‘because of growing consumer demand.’    Final translation would actually be ‘if we don’t make it our competitors will. . . so we will make it so we can make the money.’    So, that being given it falls once again to the field owners to put the brakes on this wagon.    Don’t sell red paintballs at your field, don’t use red as your field color, and don’t allow BYOP players to use red paint.    Squeeze the junk right back out of the market.    It is in your own best interests.   I know of one nervous mom who made her son quit playing because she saw red paint on his clothes and thought he was hurt.   Even when she figured it out she was so aghast from the sight that her son’s playing days were over.    That is a lost customer to the field owner.    Well, okay I’m through.       My .02 scarecrow