Canberra children as young as 10 will be the first in Australia to play a modified form of paintball that uses guns imported from the United States that look like mini pump-action shotguns but are classified as toys.
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The Medical Association for Prevention of War has criticised the move for making guns appear exciting and shooting a game, while glamourising war.
The children will also don combat overalls, full head protection goggles and body armour to play the MiniBall game, which is set to debut at Delta Force Paintball in Tuggeranong next month.
People have to be 16 or older to play paintball in the ACT.
Delta Force Paintball operations manager Seamus Fraser said children as young as 10 could now play MiniBall, which uses smaller, pump-action paintball guns.
The guns used a high-powered spring rather than compressed air to fire the paintballs.
He said they had been imported from the United States and had approval from ACT Policing, which classified them as a toy rather than a firearm. The usual paintball guns were classified as firearms.
ACT Policing has confirmed this, a spokesman saying the MiniBall guns were a ''spring-loaded toy and not classified as a paintball marker under the Firearms ACT 1996''.
Smaller paintballs were also used to put in the guns.
MiniBall is being marketed for children's birthday parties, school excursions, sporting break-ups and team-building events. It is run in a controlled environment away from adult players.
Mr Fraser said the paintball company was always being asked if younger children could play.
''We get it all the time,'' he said. ''We've got sales teams who are out and about and the biggest question they get is from parents [who] say, 'I've got an 11-year-old kid, a 12-year-old kid, their brothers and sister can play, if I sign a release form, can they go down and play?' And the answer is, 'no' because normal paintball guns are classified as firearms, so we need to be very strict on the minimum age.
''We've got so many little kids lining up just dying to go down for a game,'' Mr Fraser said.
Delta Force Paintball also had approval to run MiniBall games in Victoria, he said, but the Tuggeranong venue would host the first game in Australia on May 11.
Canberra-based Sue Wareham, vice-president of the Medical Association for Prevention of War, said it had concerns about ''activities that make weapons appear exciting and make shooting out to be a game''.
''The activity seems to be deliberately about engaging children in shooting games with guns that look like the real thing,'' she said.
''Already we see the Australian War Memorial heading in the direction of getting children to play in war games and this is quite a dangerous trend if we want our children to understand what war is really about, rather than some glamourised version.
Dr Wareham said: ''At the moment we see quite a lot of glorification of what happened at Gallipoli, despite claims that's not what's happening, but we believe that is happening to some extent. And 100 years on, we believe we should be doing all that is possible to teach our children about the reality of war, which is that weapons kill people and that is not an exciting activity.''
