originally posted by: Expat888
With how realistic they make airguns look these days and that in some areas there are 13 year old or younger kids that carry/use real firearms the
officer made a judgement call and will live with that haunting him ..
The courts made the right call ..
Guess those who hate the police here would have been happier if it was an ak47 and the kid had killed the officer ..
When I was a kid back in the '60's, my friends & I had an assortment of pellet guns, including rifles & pistols. Their major selling point was that
they were designed to "look like the real thing". I found an ad featuring the .38 Combat model I had:
The rifles were no less wicked-looking. Having gotten curious about what's available today, I took a look at the Crosman company's current stuff.
Unbelievably, in these crazy times, they're still selling stuff that would scare the crap out of anyone who thought it might get pointed in their
direction. I'm not looking to argue with anyone in this thread, but I firmly believe this part of the situation (the appearance of some of these
"lesser" weapons) needs to be made a bit clearer.
Here's the Crosman "AK":
And their AR-15 replica:
One other note about these weapons (from experience, they ain't
really toys, folks): I used to be able to stand about 20' away from a glass
bottle & shatter it to pieces with one shot (.22 caliber flat-nosed pellet); my friend had a pump model (pumped for pressure as opposed to
CO2-powered) replica of a .22 caliber rifle, that fired .177 caliber pellets, also flat-nosed.
In those days, household trash cans were made of aluminum or steel. He said, "Watch this", pumped the rifle only 6 times, stood about 8' from a metal
trash can, & put a pellet through
both sides of the can, with enough force left over for it to travel several more feet to knock a notch out of
the bark of a nearby tree.
Having had an adventurous enough youth that I got shot with a .22 caliber pellet pistol once, & knowing what I know about the power & destructive
capability of these things (especially the rifles), I wouldn't want someone turning toward me with one if I wasn't sure of their intentions. I would
imagine that a rifle something like the one in the pic above would have more of any cop's attention than the age that the person carrying it appeared
to be.
Again, I'm not looking to argue details of this case, other than to illustrate a bit more clearly the weapon part of this incident. I don't have a
problem with parents teaching their children to use something like these things safely, say on a shooting range or in a backyard, but I have a problem
with the idea of any parent being so irresponsible as to allow a 13 year old child to have one of them, then not supervise its use closely enough to
prevent that child from walking around outside with it.
edit on 7/9/2014 by BuzzCory because: Punctuation