Twelve-year-old Mannie Thames knows a lot of kids with BB guns. He says kids have them for safety and because they're cool.
"Sometimes people get bullied a lot, and they want to have something to protect their self," Thames says. "And sometimes people think it's cool, they want to shoot people for fun."
He explains this in between bites of snacks at the after-school center, Penn North Kids Safe Zone, in West Baltimore.
Replica guns that shoot BBs and other projectiles are popular with kids. But in some settings, they pose a special danger.