The Throw The Commission Took Off The Board.

Some throws are retired by fashion, quietly and without paperwork. Lawn darts were retired by rule, loudly, over signatures.

The object was a large weighted dart tipped with a metal spike, thrown underhand in a high arc toward a ground ring. Its defining feature was that the hazard lived not in the release but in the landing, where the point came down first.

Marketed through the mid-century as wholesome backyard leisure under names such as Jarts, the projectile carried enough mass and enough point to pierce a skull. The Consumer Product Safety Commission would later estimate roughly 6,700 emergency-room injuries across a decade, most of them to children under ten, and three of them fatal.

The file has a face. In 1987 a seven-year-old girl, Michelle Snow, was killed by an errant lawn dart, and her father, David Snow, spent the following year pressing regulators for an outright prohibition rather than another label.

Governance had, in fact, already been attempted and found wanting. Rules from the 1970s had restricted the darts to sale as an adult outdoor game, kept off the toy shelves, on the theory that supervision would substitute for safety.

A toy you must not sell as a toy is already a verdict in search of a form.

The form arrived in December 1988, when the Commission banned the sale of lawn darts in the United States outright. Canada followed with its own prohibition the next year.

The ban is not perfectly enforceable. The objects persist in garages, at estate sales, and in the informal economy, enjoying an ungoverned afterlife no order can fully reach.

The Desk records lawn darts as the uncommon case in which the corporate posture was not to standardize the throw but to withdraw its license to exist at all.

Compliance verdict: License revoked, not amended. The Desk files lawn darts as a governed throw that the governing body elected to remove from the board, and marks the residual inventory as a standing hazard.