In the last six months, Airsoft guns and pocket bikes have become wildly popular "toys" among youth and adults alike, but the Campbell Police Department is warning anyone who wants to get into these new gadgets to exercise extreme caution.

"People can get hurt," says Campbell police officer Carlos Guerrero.

On March 29, Leigh High School, in the Campbell Union High School District, experienced a lockdown, as a youth brandishing what looked like a weapon was seen walking toward the campus in the early morning. When the boy was found, police discovered that the gun in his hand was an Airsoft gun.

In Morgan Hill earlier this year, a SWAT team was called out to an elementary school playground filled with parents watching their children practicing Little League baseball. The police received calls from panicked 911 callers that four children wearing masks and holding guns were on an adjacent field. When the police caught up with them, they found that the boys were merely holding Airsoft guns, too.

And in the Orchard City, a boy at Campbell Middle School had a gun confiscated from him after he had brought it on campus to show off to his friends.

Although by law any replica of a firearm must have a bright orange tip to distinguish it from a real gun, Guerrero says, the realism of the models has gotten so accurate that police are finding it more difficult to tell if a gun is real or fake. To make matters worse, these Airsoft gun owners often paint over the orange tip with black markers to give the facsimile a more realistic appearance.

And with memories of the disaster at Columbine High School in Colorado fresh on their minds, police are under greater pressure to take quick action on potentially dangerous situations involving guns, which can result in officers drawing their own weapons.

"People need to understand that if other people see the gun and think it's real, the police will probably think it's real, too," says Guerrero.

Although there has been only one incident in Campbell, Guerrero says, "The popularity of the hobby is growing, and we're only going to see more of them as time goes by."

As a D.A.R.E. officer who routinely visits schools in the Campbell Union School District, he says he's interviewed many children, and about 15 percent of the fifth-graders in the district say they have Airsoft guns.

But the children are only the latest people caught up in a hobby whose popularity began three decades ago.

Some people say the Airsoft hobby got its start in the early 1970s, when a major U.S. BB gun manufacturer invented a new type of gun that used a small amount of air to shoot lightweight plastic or ceramic BBs. Traditional BB guns shoot metal projectiles.

The hobby, however, didn't really take off in a big way until Japanese companies began making them in the late 1980s. Toy manufacturers there began to make nearly 1-to-1 scale-size Airsoft replicas of real guns, paying close attention to reproduce not only the dimensions and colors of the real thing, but the weight, balance and loading mechanisms as well.

Because the replicas were virtually identical to the real thing, the Airsoft hobby satisfied the need of people who were enthralled by guns but had no access to them in their country because of a nationwide ban on firearms. By the early 1990s, Airsoft was as popular in Japan as paintball was in the United States. And the Airsoft hobby soon began to gain traction in the United States, with both adults and children attracted to the allure of realistic-looking weapons.

"Some people are just curious and excited about guns," Guerrero says. "And Airsoft is as close as they're going to get. For them it's cool."

Today, Airsoft war-gaming clubs are sprouting all around the country. People, especially teenagers and males in their 20s, run around forests and mocked-up urban warfare settings shooting each other with spring-loaded, gas-powered or electrically fired guns of all sizes and shapes.

And places like Santa Clara's Airsoft Extreme, the only store in the South Bay dedicated specifically to the Airsoft hobby, are supplying these new hobbyists with everything they need.

A visitor to the shop on Laurelwood Avenue can take his pick of Airsoft guns ranging in price from about $100 to a couple of thousand dollars. Shoppers can find everything from the Heckler & Koch USP 45 Compact—a semiautomatic pistol issued to detectives in the Campbell Police Department—to a life-size Airsoft replica of an M-60 machine gun, which Sylvester Stallone made popular in his first Rambo movie.

"Airsoft Extreme is where are all the hard-core enthusiasts go," Guerrero says. "It's like they have a replica for every pistol, rifle or shotgun ever made."

Customers who go there are generally willing to pay hefty prices for guns because they are true hobbyists who know what they want and know how to take care of the guns, he says. If someone there is new to the Airsoft hobby, the staff behind the counter will explain in full detail the do's and don'ts of handling a gun. And Guerrero says the store's policies help keep the guns in responsible hands.

The store won't sell to anyone under 18 years old, unless the buyer is accompanied by parents.

But according to Guerrero, the hard-core hobbyists aren't the ones the police are worried about.

Less-expensive Airsoft guns can be found at places like Sportmart, Big 5 Sporting Goods and even Fry's Electronics. Typically selling for about $25, these lower-end, affordable guns often find their way into the hands of children and adults who may not be knowledgeable about the safety precautions or may not care about them.

Gremic Sports in Los Gatos sells the less-expensive kinds.

"We sell mostly to the casual hobbyist," says manager Scott vanLeewen. However, he ensures that anyone buying guns at his store can produce identification showing that he or she is at least 18.

"Anyone underage who got their guns from us had to have had their parent buy it for them," he says.

Guerrero says it's very important for parents to tell their children that the guns should be treated as real guns. They should never be pointed at someone and they should always be handled with care.

Pocket bikes are another recent phenomenon for which police are urging care. Originally introduced as racing bikes in Europe and Asia, they have recently found their way into the homes and streets of America.

The typical pocket bike looks like a replica of a real racing motorcycle, except it is about a quarter of the size. The pocket bikes come in two types: those with electric-powered engines and those with gas-powered engines. Entry-level bikes can be found at flea markets, auto dealers and various retail shops for approximately $200 to $300.

Although they've been common on racing circuits for a while, police haven't seen them in numbers on the street until recently.

"These pocket bikes are quite new," says Campbell police officer Dave Cameron. "When I first came across them about six months ago, I had an officer call me over and ask if it was a scooter."

Scooters and bikes are classified very differently, he says.

Motor scooters are defined in a different section of the vehicle code from the one for bikes, Cameron says.

For a device to be a motor scooter, people must be able to stand or sit on it. The driver isn't required to have a license, though there is a minimum age limit of 16 years old. Drivers must also wear a bike helmet and drive the scooters in the bike lane.

Pocket bikes don't fit the classification.

"You definitely can't stand on a pocket bike," Cameron says.

A pocket bike is not a scooter, he says. They are actually classified as a motor-driven cycle, but because the California Department of Motor Vehicles doesn't register them, none of them are legal on public roads.

The problem is that these bikes are still often marketed as scooters, he says, which lead people to believe that they are street legal and do not require a license.

"We don't have problems with the motorcycles themselves," Cameron says, who explains that they are perfectly fine if driven on private property with the owner's permission. "We have problems with the way some people are selling them."

At the San Jose Flea Market on Berryessa Avenue, for example, merchants sell pocket bikes in a stall that refers to them as scooters. And once most people buy them, they don't understand the laws that they must follow.

"People are riding these things are all over the place," Cameron says.

They are driving them the way they are not supposed to be driven, like on the wrong side of road and without helmets. They just seem to drive them where they want to go."

He's even seen one person driving while drunk.

"I arrested him after he ran into the back of a parked car," Cameron says. "He almost did himself in."

Although it isn't required for the driver of a pocket bike to have a license right now, a new bill is in the state Assembly that will require drivers to have a motorcycle license to operate pocket bikes.

"The main thing is that they're illegal to be on a public roadway, period," Cameron says.