Thank you for posting the side-by-side. Under most circumstances most people would likely not be able to tell the difference. Key word there is “most people.” In today’s society thoroughly intimidated by the progressive anti-gun media I can very readily see where a ‘mistaken’ gun identity could happen.
The question(s) in this situation becomes:
What is the police protocol for an armed citizen open carrying? Does a child maintain that right? Toy gun or not?
I could understand the police using extreme caution on approach. Is 10 seconds enough caution to properly identify the gun? Earlier this week I took the standpoint that the kid’s parents were ultimately at fault for the tragedy. Because the kid should have been old enough to respond the police orders. Now that we see it was only 10 seconds, wow, what is a reasonable response time? Did the kid even know they were talking to him, given he knew he had a “toy?”
Again, I can see both sides here. A kid, a teenager for that matter, walking around a neighborhood with something like this...playing tough-guy, playing bad guy?
As a child, if you grew-up around guns, you learned gun safety from an adult. I recall my dad teaching us kids a good dose of gun safety around the BB and pellet guns the brother’s had. By the time we were teenagers if the cops told us to put the ‘gun down’...yeah we would have been startled, but would have complied. Would 10 seconds have been long enough for compliance? Would we have turned around in ‘surprise’ and been shot? Would we have known how to hold the gun in a non-threatening manner?
So this to a degree still comes back to the parents.
But there is now the glaring reality of a 10 second time frame for compliance. Given that the ‘toy gun’ is obviously altered and without the very identifiers that would have saved this child’s life. Which the fact the airsoft gun is devoid of the safety identifiers...leads us back to the parental control over this teenager.
The kid removed those safety identifiers, the parents were not monitoring the potential dangerous toy for such alterations and it cost this child his freakin’ life.
Ten seconds doesn’t sound like very long but count it out.