Ferguson St Louis - Michael Brown shot by police

I’m glad people are starting to see the subtleties of these situations. I hope the judicial system failures help us all realize these holistic problems won’t be solved in a courtroom.

In the meantime, the “free” adulthood opportunity here (by that I mean it requires zero laws, zero votes, zero training) is for parents to remove replica guns from their households, even ones with orange safety indicators that can be detached, as was the case here. I know if I ever get my kids airsoft guns, they’ll now be stored and treated as if they were real guns. With the national attention this case has received, any parent that has not done so is knowingly putting his or her children at risk.

Reworking police procedures and attitudes is a gargantuan task, but there’s another “easy” opportunity: train police dispatchers to relay information that officers can use to approach a situation with less of an attack mentality.

Finally, I see via Google some departments are training police to administer first aid after a shooting. This seems like basic human decency, but I assume they’re not allowed to touch people without a certificate of approval. That should be easy enough.

Doesn’t everyone want to be “tough on crime” though? What we really need are better trained cops, and programs where cops and the communities they serve are not enemies of each other. It would also help if bad cops who did bad things were occasionally punished for it.

Exactly. The shoot first, ask questions later mentality needs to be culled.

I’d be careful with using the word easy for this. Yes, as a parent you can choose which products you buy and push to pick only items not easily altered but did you forget childhood already? Half the toys I played with at that age were not mine and not at my house. My parents gave me allowance and didn’t inspect everything I purchased, and that was before access to the internet. Unless you plan on keeping your child in some sort of parent bubble, even your best efforts might not keep these kinds of toys out of your child’s hands. Even if we passed a law that said orange and red stripes need to be worked throughout all toy guns… people keep importing them from China or outside the country illegally… again not necessary you as a parent but kid’s half twit uncle that your kid play’s with’s fault. Or maybe it’s the kid your child sits with at school, or goes to school with on a bus, or it’s a toy just left a park.

For every responsible parent out there there are at least two dozen terrible parents to match. There’s no “easy” for that.

I think he is referring to reports that the dispatcher in this case failed to pass along information that the cops might have found useful. Info regarding the kid and the “gun” if I remember right. Had the cops known as they jumped out of their car that the kid most likely didn’t have a real gun they might have reacted differently.

You’re right of course. This is a bottom-up solution. It can’t magically solve the problem.

You’re also right that kids like to play with things they can’t have. I’m a big believer in education. I’d rather parents openly teach kids about guns and how to respect them. But I’m realistic and I know a lot of people quiver at the thought. Throwing them away at least lowers the odds for families who are unwilling to go that route.

Well kids are not adults, no matter how much you teach them. They’re going to make poor decisions, and they’re going to do it often. With any lucky and a good community, their mistakes won’t get them killed. You’re right too. I don’t know why any parent buys any sort of toy the even resembles a real gun. I wouldn’t encourage kids to walk around with one in a casual way even when they look fake either.

This case is just so sad, and whether it’s criminal or not, well they say not. But I refuse to believe that the answer to this is to have smarter kids. It’s not about smarts. Kids will make mistakes. Kids will more often than not, not act like adults with good common sense. We shouldn’t expect them to. Their brains are literally not fully developed, so the adults need to figure out how adults can do better. I know it’s not popular with the gun enthusiasts, but I think all these fake guns should look fake and not just easily manipulated or removable tips.

Agreed. I can only imagine the rage the mother and family must feel towards this incompetent fool.

As for comments regarding training in weapons handling etc. Bizarre and irrelevant.

I’m not sure that anyone has tried to make the argument that the responsibility for the event lies upon the child. I think that most would agree that a child is not entirely responsible for their actions.

In terms of guns looking fake, no firearm enthusiast demands that toys look like real weapons. Indeed, the pellet gun in question likely had an orange barrel tip originally, but kids remove them because the gun looks cooler without it. I’m not sure if even the NRA is going to demand realistic toy guns. I suspect the drive for such toys comes entirely from there being a market for them.

The problem with this is that witnesses will often say bullshit. If someone says “it might be a fake gun” (probably based on the suspect looking young) the police probably can’t take that as scripture.

My favorite example of that was that one case semi recent case where some crazy guy stole a rifle from a walmart and was then rammed by a police car before he could get to a crowded area. One of the guys from walmart told the cops that the gun was locked and couldn’t be used. Then shortly after that, the guy fired the gun in to the air. It turned out the lock was not actually put on the gun correctly.

Kids want guns that look like the cool guns they see good guys brandishing on TV.

A concerted push to remove gun porn from our maintstream media is actually probably the most effective thing we can do to reduce gun violence and raise American support for sensible gun laws. It would take decades to come to fruition though.

Kids, be kids and they will play with arrows and bows. The streets where Homero used to walk where probably filled with kids playing their version of Cowboy & Indians (Acheans vs Troyans?) when he wrote the Illiad, that is a story with guns in it, and violence.

So you can’t completely remove all gun porn, and maybe it will not even be a good thing.

But it can be reduced, or move to a corner, if you find something else to occupy the resulting void, because is hard to replace something that works if you don’t have a alternative that is better.

I think…

Not here but elsewhere yeah they are, like this kid is should have known better than to take the plastic end off (assuming he did that himself) and go to a play area to play with a toy. Like most 12 years olds think that far ahead… somebody might see, the cops might come, i might be killed… most just don’t do that, yet.

Seemed like the best thread for this? A Tennessee state representative and city councilman are getting into it on Twitter after the rep, Andy Holt, tweeted to ask how he could send support to the militia in Oregon. By militia, of course we mean an armed group of white men who have taken over a federally owned and operated building. Amazingly in the handful of articles I’ve skimmed, none of them have referred to the group as terrorists.

I think it’d be stretching it to call them terrorists, since they aren’t actually trying to inspire fear in anyone.

They’re basically armed protestors who are trespassing on federal land. They really should be arrested, but clearly the government wants to avoid a Waco type incident. It makes me wonder though how certain groups would react if people they didn’t like (aka brown people) had a bunch of legally purchased firearms and occupied some location similarly to what is happening in Oregon.

This is mostly what I was getting at – I would be extremely surprised if in this situation the media was as reluctant to use the word terrorist.

I guess it comes down to your definition of terrorist. They’re using the threat of violence (and the fear that threat inspires) to attempt to achieve political ends. Sounds like terrorism to me, albeit they haven’t killed anyone (yet, at this location). Using the FBI’s definition, they seem to meet the definition of domestic terrorism:

Taking over a federal facility (violation of the law) with the threat of violence (intimidation) for the purpose of changing policy seems to pretty clearly meet the definition of domestic terrorist.

These guys seem like the descendants of the militia movement of the 90s – a movement which, if memory serves, lost steam once some of their members blew up a federal building, got caught, and were sentenced to death. The movement revitalized once an African American (secret muslim!) was elected president, with the accompanying calls that the government was coming for peoples’ guns, etc. Honestly, if the Black Panthers or Nation of Islam pulled a similar stunt, I suspect the compound would have been burned down around their ears already.

My only question would be: are the acts dangerous to human life? I mean, I guess one could argue driving 5 mph over the speed limit on a state highway is dangerous to human life and violating the law, so there’s a rational threshold to consider. The use of guns may indeed cross that, but if they weren’t pointing them at anyone then perhaps not.

I was going to roll my eyes at you guys and your unsophisticated FUD, but I see WaPo is making the same points word for word. Haha!

It appears law enforcement is more sophisticated about dealing with these groups. They don’t seem to be swarming the area for a standoff. Maybe they’ll just wait them out for a while. You can always charge them with crimes later.