Because there too many paranoid and trigger-happy cops out there:
“The 12-year-old boy wielding what turned out to be a BB gun when he was shot by police outside a Cleveland recreation center died early Sunday morning, a police union official confirmed. … The shooting came after a man at the park adjacent to the rec center called police when he saw “a guy with a gun pointing it at people.” The caller twice said the gun was ‘probably fake’ and told dispatchers the person pulling the gun from his waistband was ‘probably a juvenile,’ according to audio released by police officials late Saturday.”
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/12-year-old_boy_shot_by_clevel.html
Where to begin? Parsing various news reports, here’s what we know:
(1) The kid was shot by a rookie cop (accompanied by a veteran officer).
(2) The 911 caller told the dispatcher the gun was “probably fake” and the person with it was a “juvenile.”
(3) The cop ordered the kid to drop the gun. He didn’t. He pulled it out of his waistband and waved it around. That’s what kids do.
(4) The police department and police union are defending this shooting. Of course they are. A police spokesman said, “When an officer gives a command, we expect it to be followed. The way it looks like right now, it wasn’t followed.” What, is he serious? If a kid doesn’t do exactly what a cop tells him to do, that’s sufficient justification for the cop to blow the kid away?
(5) The kid’s mother was indoors, across the street, and says she doesn’t understand why the police killed her son. Is she kidding? What kind of parenting is this? Here’s a hint for the clueless: If you let your kid play outdoors unsupervised with a toy that looks like a real gun, and someone calls the police, it’s just possible that the paranoid and trigger-happy cops we have patrolling our streets nowadays might kill your kid.
Look, we obviously have some serious issues with how cops are recruited, trained, and supervised, and with the attitude of all too many street cops that subjectively feeling even slightly threatened gives them a license to shoot elderly people, women, children, people of color, anyone … you get the idea. That’s tough to fix, maybe it’s unfixable, and certainly not overnight. I can’t do anything about that. And we live under a state of heightened alert thanks to all the mass shootings being committed (thanks to the easy availability of guns to all and sundry). We even have kids shooting up schools. In fact, almost every other week, it seems.
So, for God’s sake, don’t let your kids play outdoors with toy guns. Somebody — maybe a scared young cop with little or no judgment — might take it wrong. And then, next thing you know, you’ll be caught up in planning a funeral for your kid.