This Is Not a Gun: So, Officers, Stop Shooting Unarmed Black Men

[tblue37]

19. I think that toys should not be allowed to be made to look like real guns.

guns. I don't understand why that is permitted at all. Oh, sure, they are supposed to have that silly orange tip, but it is so easy to remove that it is ridiculous.

These fake guns should be required to be made of brightly colored materials--neon orange, candy cane striped red and white, fuschia pink, bright robin's egg blue, shiny purple with silver glitter--that sort of thing.

Of course, the appeal of these real-looking fake guns is specifically that they look real, but if having them made of brightly colored and/or glittery materials makes them unappealing to the kids who are attracted to the apparent authenticity of the real-looking guns, then I don't have a problem with that, because I think we'd all be better off if kids were not sucked early into the whole romance with deadly killing tools.

The video of the boy parading up and down the sidewalk playing with the gun before he was shot reminds me of when I was a 6-year-old with a toy six-shooter in a holster on my hip (and a silver star badge pinned to my shirt). I strutted around outside, whipping out my gun and pointing it at imaginary bad guys, then reholstering it for a couple of minutes, only to pull it out again when another imaginary bad guy suddenly appeared.

That kid was so obviously playing with that fake gun--especially when he started twirling it around in his hand, exactly the way I twirled my little six-shooter sometimes before reholstering it.

Those realistic looking fake guns simply should not be allowed to be manufactured. A fake gun should be so obviously fake that even the most willfully aggressive and racist cop could never mistake it for a real gun at any distance.