First reaction: Kallen has a very strange definition of "white".

And he must have lost track at some point because today is not Saturday. Unless we're talking about two different cases, which both occurred in Cleveland, Ohio.

The case in Ohio in the toy aisle was much worse, both than this case and the Brown case, I don't see why it hasn't been discussed more.

Tragic failure of parenting in this case. By some estimates, there are over 300 million firearms in the United States. Hell, I'd be willing to bet that real firearms are more prevalent than AirSoft replicas of firearms. Police officers are a bunch of douchebags, but they have a right to go home to their families at the end of their shift. The cop reasonably assumed the worst and acted accordingly.

parenting failure? Really?

Letting your 12-year-old go to a (presumably crowded park) with an AirSoft gun that doesn't have an orange tip is a parenting failure of the highest order.

What do you know about the parents?

Me and my buddies fucked around with AirSoft guns all the time back in the day, but we did it in sparsely populated areas and we NEVER took off the orange tips. Furthermore, we tried to buy AirSoft guns that were finished in obviously non-real-firearm colors.

I know that their 12-year-old was in that disposition that resulted in him getting killed.

I googled "airsoft hand gun" and looked at the images both on the company's own website and just generic images online. If someone pointed one of those at me without the orange tip on it, and all I had was a split second to react, I wouldn't be taking time to judge how old the person holding the gun was. That is coming from me, a lefty "we need gun control" whacko, because I've seen first-hand what bullets do to bodies in emergency rooms and in the OR.

Hey Gunfighter, what do you know about his parents?

I'm going to paint the tip of my gun orange just to fuck with the police.

read about the incident SC cited, and holy shit, that is an egregious wrong. absolutely right, it's amazing this one didn't get air time but the others did

I agree. The Crawford case is appalling. I think that one really highlights the kind of wrong that people are trying to use the Ferguson case to complain about, and I think it's really too bad they don't choose these clearer cases.

Are you guys talking about the Walmart case with Crawford? Because what the actual fuck, how do you get that one wrong? (Also, who were the idiots who called that one in?)

As for the airsoft one in the park, gunfighter is a bit right. When I went out to play airsoft with my friends, it was always in wooded areas, away from people, and the guns had their plastic sights on. I don't know how many lectures my parents gave me on kids getting shot by police for having an airsoft gun.

I agree that this was a parenting issue. I may have been tempted to take a fake gun to a park, and not know about the need for an orange tip, but if a cop tells me to put it down and he's pointing a REAL gun at me, my parents taught me to respect authority and use my head, so you'd better believe I'd put it down, not point it at the cop.

Anymore, with guns making their way into elementary schools, you never know who's carrying and who's not. Kids in inner city gangs get a hold of em all the time.

You all are assuming that the parents aren't working, there are places like the woods in inner cities away from people to play, and a whole other slew of assumptions from your upbringing that may or may not apply. I know for a fact not one of my guns had a tip on it, I played with it outside, but since fortunately I was a little white boy in the suburbs where the other parents knew me no one called the cops. In addition I was taught to trust the police because the police have an interest in protecting little white boys in the suburbs, many inner city communities do not have the same perspective.

If there's one thing we've learned, it's that "don't trust the police" should not imply "hold onto your toy gun when a policeman with a gun tells you to drop it." Quite the contrary.

Not to otherwise jump into the parenting issue, which I don't feel strongly about either way.

@ Santa

"Hey Gunfighter, what do you know about his parents?"

For the second time, I know that their 12-year-old was in that disposition that resulted in him getting killed.

"I know that their 12-year-old was in that disposition that resulted in him getting killed." -Gunfighter

Well, who else allowed their 12-year-old to be at a (presumably crowded) park and wave an imitation gun at people?

Depends if it has an orange tip on the barrel.

Dear God, I looked up the John Crawford case and can't think of how that isn't getting more coverage. I agree with Santa that it was far worse.

"Tragic failure of parenting in this case" - glad you have a sense of responcibility; being that i'm working with 12 year olds on a daily basis i can tell you a lot of them don't do exactly what they're told - even if their parents are doing the best job they can.

But families don't exist in a vacumn - there is a neighbourhood, a community beyond that and community policing inside of that. Unfortunately when the police have a shoot first and not have to worry about being indited for murder when they are wrong they have a social system which supports making mistakes like this.

Again, i have never seen a police officer in Ireland carrying a firearm. (have in england on the transport system when there were terror alerts, and it felt really weird) i did get stopped while carrying my granddad's airsoft rifle (no orange tip) and had it confiscated - because they are used to rob people, looked and sounded enough like a gun to fool people; guess what, i wasn't shoot at, because the police felt comfortable approaching me (this was outside the US embassy, and embassy security do carry firearms)

So you can easily blame the family, and pretend that all fault lies with them; or you can look at larger government/societal responcibility; in Ireland we have a paternalistic government, which i happen to detest (but that's cause i believe individuals should be treated like adults not children), but they have taken the responcibility to keep children (and everyone else) safe.

You CAN choose to lay the blame entirely on the parent's shoulders but you will be missing the fact that other societies don't have this kind of problem; and it isn't because of better parenting, it is because of better governance. (and sure, in a democracy you should get the government you deserve, so i'd lay the blame on the people not the will of the people which the government is - at least in this case - representing)

"You CAN choose to lay the blame entirely on the parent's shoulders but you will be missing the fact that other societies don't have this kind of problem; and it isn't because of better parenting, it is because of better governance. (and sure, in a democracy you should get the government you deserve, so i'd lay the blame on the people not the will of the people which the government is - at least in this case - representing)"

If anything, I blame pop culture and mass media, not governance. No government law or set of laws would have prevented this child's death. But there is such a thing as a 'monkey see, monkey do' phenomenon. Violence is all too common in mass media. Guns are always the answer for our favorite action heroes, when in reality guns are rarely the answer. I guarantee that this child was not raised in a violence-free household, nor am I suggesting that he should have been. Whether the control of violent media should fall on the parents' shoulders or the government's shoulders is admittedly up for debate.

Also, on a semantical note, the US is a constitutional republic with democratic elections, not a democracy.

"No government law or set of laws would have prevented this child's death."

Now you're just wrong. In some countries, your average cop doesn't even have a gun to shoot the kid with. I bet a better solution would be found by such a cop than to call the people who do have guns to shoot the kid.

Give a man a gun and he's more likely to fire a gun at someone. This someone can be anyone, maybe even a 12-year-old kid.

Cops have guns in America because criminals have guns in America. If you want criminals to not have guns, you need to repeal the Second Amendment. Nothing less with prevent guns being abundant, and thus inevitably falling into the hands of people who would use them for crime. Disarming police before the supply of illegal guns is cut off would be absurd.

Not denying any of that. I'm simply stating it is not true that there is no government law or set of laws that would have prevented this child's death.

What law could that be, though? This boy tragically pointed a gun which looked just like a real gun at a police officer. How else could he react? From his perceptive, it was he who was about to be shot. What law could prevent that?