Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is getting a gun that is also a bong, resulting in a backlash from players who are upset they got banned for toxic voice chat in a game that is 'promoting using drugs'

Call of Duty-focused Twitter account ModernWarzone has shared a datamined clip of a gun that is also a bong you can smoke coming soon to Black Ops 6. That alone has me pondering the state of things, but the skin also seems to have sparked a heated debate in the comments: Why is it OK to have a bong gun in Call of Duty if it's against the terms of service to verbally abuse teammates? Only on X, "The Everything App."

Before anything else, I'm gonna go ahead and tap the sign PC Gamer staff writer Morgan Park hung up last year: Every time a new shooter launches, you gotta start a countdown until it becomes a clown show of brands and hideous skins. Black Ops 6 appears to be speedrunning this process while also reaching for new heights of absurdity, including eye-searing skins that have some players begging to be able to turn them off.

The bong gun is truly an appalling, over the top masterwork. Were it a meal, it would give you gout instantly and you'd want to hide your face from god like you were eating ortolan. Neon, animated, Mtn. Dew-green glass globules festoon a black and gold assault rifle. As an inspect animation, you take off the stock, reattach it elsewhere on the gun, and hold it out to smoke a bowl⁠—your lighter, by the way, is a diminutive fire-breathing lizard.

It is so overpoweringly stupid and I don't even want to know how much it will cost, but also? I kind of respect the sheer "damn the world, and good taste" decadence of this thing. From first concept to implementation, how much money and how many man-hours does it take to make a bong gun? I would never buy a bong gun, but it gives me a kind of sick thrill to know that it's out there in the world, making people mad.

I usually wouldn't put stock in the comments on X, "The Everything App," but there's quite a few people saying the same thing, they're getting a lot of heat, and the argument is so bizarre, so stupid, I'm reminded of internet greats like the Bodybuilding.com forum debate over how many days are in a week.

"Comm banning players for swearing but promotion of drug use," declares one comment with 8,500 likes. "Imagine banning people for swearing etc but promoting using drugs," asserts another with an eye-watering 11,000 likes⁠—11,000 people, give or take a few thousand bots, all expressing some approval of the argument. "But heaven forbid you tell someone they're trash at the game," another bemoans. One even shared a picture of the offensive chat warning they received.

I counted at least 25 semi-credible (who even knows these days) comments complaining about Call of Duty's enforcement of its in-game code of conduct when the game contains references to drug use, including one that repeated the slur that they were temporarily banned for. I'd argue that playing an M-rated game with gun violence and fairly absurd depictions of what is, in real life, increasingly pedestrian and legal drug use doesn't entitle you to tell your teammates to kill themselves. But you know what? Not my circus, not my monkeys. Maybe having to see the bong gun is a fitting karmic punishment for being the sort of person who gets freaky in voice chat.