The BBC News article "Tamir Rice shooting: Call for US replica gun law change" reports that a 12-year-old boy was shot by police after pulling out what turned out to be a replica gun, which is promoting calls for the guns to be more clearly marked (2014).
The boy, Tamir Rice, had a replica gun and was shot by police and died. Who is blamed? The producer made a replica gun, the parents paid money for the replica gun, the boy played with the replica gun, and the police shot him. The case is under investigation to clarify what exactly happend, but any explanation cannot resurrect the dead boy.
Why do people made toys looking like real firearms? Toys are just for children's joy and developing. Adults have made toys which resemble real things because the more looking like real things are more expensive. Sometimes we worry about children cannot distinguish a real thing from an imaginable thing, but the article shows that we adults cannot know which one is real in a short time when we have to decide a urgent thing. The good solution for our society is that we throw away all kinds of firearms without concern of whether they are real or not, if we can. However, we know well we cannot. It's sad reality. Then just for toys for children, don't we have a hope having a toy world without replica firearms?
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I'm glad that Katie chose this sad story to blog.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read it a couple of days ago, I was horrified. And I have some questions about the Cleveland police force, the government officers who shot and killed the 12-year-old playing in a park.
Apparently the gun did look realistic, and as a child, my own toy guns had to have some semblance of realism to be acceptable as a toy. Some looney US politician's proposal to pass a law requiring toy guns to be brightly coloured just wouldn't pass the test of most children, at least not in my day.
But what worried me more than the fact that it was hard to tell whether the gun was real or not was the Cleveland police thought a reasonable response to a 12-year-old boy waving what might have been a real gun was to shoot to kill. That is what I cannot understand.
Even if they were sure that the gun was real, which they clearly were not, how can it be a reasonable response to shoot to kill a child?
And were I a 12-year-old faced by shouting police officers waving guns at me, I would surely panic and behave oddly. Are the Cleveland police so truly stupid that they don't know this? Are they really so ignorant of basic human nature and reactions?
As Katie suggests, we don't yet know exactly how this horrible event occurred, but I can't help thinking it shows that there are some very serious problems in the Cleveland police dept.
And then there is the race factor.
If it were a 12-year-old white boy rather than a black boy, would the police have so readily shot him dead?
And now my remaining coffee really is cold.
DeleteAnd it's time to get ready to go to AUA.
But I've done my two response comments for the day. When are you writing yours? There are now plenty of varied topics and ideas to respond to, and more coming every day following the our blogging schedule.