The airsoft don’t inflict serious damage but they do hurt. An explainer on the Combat City website explains, “There is a degree of pain associated with airsoft just like paintball.  It is significantly less than paintball and without the swelling.”

A trip to Combat City costs about $150, which includes the cost of the gun modification.

And for added safety, participants are outfitted in a set of protective gear including helmets and padding over sensitive areas.

“There is supposed to be a degree of pain so that you do learn from it,” Kaplan said. “Someone’s trying to hurt you.  You learn how to be as tactical as a civilian can be.”

All of the action takes place inside a former grocery store that has been modified into an indoor combat setting.

From there, customers are broken up into teams and take part in various games ranging from capture the flag to hostage simulations.

And in a move that may shock some, children are allowed to participate as well.

“We get ’em at all ages,” Kaplan said in a separate interview with Fox35, noting that one of the participants on the video was 8-years-old.

A disclaimer on the Combat City site says “all ages are welcome,” adding, ” We can not tell you what you or your child can handle.  There are young kids playing at Combat City on a daily basis, only you can decide.”

Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Daniel Lippman.

This is from an older piece, but I ran across it while browsing the internet.  It is from the Cleveland Fed, by Michael Bryan and Guhan Venkatu, 2001, excerpt:

The data indicate that the public’s estimates and predictions of inflation are significantly and systematically related to the demographic characteristics of the respondents. People with high incomes perceive and anticipate much less inflation than people with low incomes, married people less than singles, whites less than nonwhites, and middle-aged people less than young people. This Commentary describes what is perhaps the most curious observation of all: Even after we hold constant income, age, education, race, and marital status, men and women hold very different views on the rate at which prices are changing.

And now, more specifically:

In the roughly 20,000 responses we have received from our telephone survey since August 1998, the average rate at which respondents thought prices had risen over the previous 12 months was about 6.0 percent. This “perception” of inflation is more than twice the rise recorded by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) over the same period (2.7 percent). Further, if we separate our sample by gender, we find that the average inflation perceived by the nearly 8,500 men who answered our survey was 4.6 percent. While this response is higher than the official CPI inflation estimate, it pales in comparison to the 6.9 percent inflation perceived by the roughly 11,500 women who took our survey. What accounts for such a large discrepancy between the inflation rate perceived by the two sexes?

I found it through this piece, cited by Instapundit.  Is it possible that a high perception of inflation is largely the result of a relatively low real income, perhaps mixed in with a slight unwillingness to blame oneself for imperfect labor market prospects?  Does this help explain why tight money and stagnant median income have come together?

This is from Gavyn Davies and Juan Antolin-Diaz:

We conclude that fiscal policy is responsible for a little less than half of the UK’s under-performance compared with the US, with much of the rest being due to the sluggish growth of UK export markets in recent years. The decline in UK oil production, and the possible under-recording of UK GDP in the official statistics, should also be taken into account. Therefore, while there is certainly some truth in the fiscal story, it is far from the whole truth.

So why the big difference with the U.S. performance?

We find that a large amount of the difference is explained by the fact that US export markets have grown much more strongly than UK markets over the past 5 years. This has been for two reasons. First, the UK’s greater exposure to the recession-hit markets of the eurozone has been very damaging, especially in the past two years. Second, and actually much more important, the UK’s lack of exposure to the rapidly growing markets in the emerging economies has been a major structural problem in recent years. The US, in contrast, has greatly increased its exposure to the emerging markets, notably in Latin America.

The summary blog post is here, and underlying research is here. Note that the bigger you make the multiplier, the more that exports should matter as well.