Technically, I am not sure how you could to that without screwing up the opening of the barrel. May not be that they won't do anything illegal, it is just that they don't have the engineering skills.
/sarCHASM/ n. the wide conversational gap when someone uses sarcasm, which was not noticed.
BTW, isn't it orange on the barrel?
- . Christopher A. Young Learn about Jesus
It could be as simple as just pushing a piece of orange plastic into the barrel. From several feet way it might be enough to make a cop pause.
I hope that idea doesn't catch on.
If I had me a real pistol I'd put a plastic tip on so I could spot it when I dropped it on the sidewalk and went back to look for it.
If I were a criminal, I wouldn't want a plastic tip. How could I intimidate people if my gun looked like a toy? If I went out to shoot somebody, I wouldn't want a plastic tip making my gun conspicuous.
Maybe if I walked up to a cop, the orange tip might make him think I wanted nothing more than to shoot his eye out, but if I bounced a round off his body armor, he might shout, "No fair!" and shoot me.
Paint or orange tape.
When I was 12, I has a .22 starter pistol. My parents never knew I had it and it was legal. I was smart enough not to point it at police though.
Local people seem to have a good handle on it. He didn't realize that in his hat and coat, he looked older. He wasn't trying to scare anyone. He was a lonely kid playing at the park. At his age, he thought everybody could see he was just a kid playing with a simulated firearm.
The police car arrived very suddenly. The passenger cop said he shouted three times, "Show me your hands!" as the boy moved toward him, raising his jacket and drawing his gun.
It seems outlandish that he would try to scare the cops. The explanation is simple. He wasn't trained for the startling confrontation. He couldn't imagine that the cop saw him as a threat. He interpreted the cop's demand as, "Show me your gun!"
Now I lean toward Thane. If there had been a procedure that gave the cops and the kid more time to comprehend the situation, the ending would have been happy. I'm sure they teach it at the Andy Griffith Police Academy!
Police killed a young black man at a Walmart near Dayton in August. He'd gone there to play video games. Instead, he strolled around talking to his girlfriend on his cell phone. He absent-mindedly picked up a pellet gun that had been unpackaged and left on a shelf. I think that was Walmart marketing: kids who saw how much it looked like an assault rifle, would buy one on impulse.
As he walked and talked, sometimes the rifle was pointed at the floor, sometimes at the ceiling, and sometimes at a shelf. The aisles were pretty deserted. He didn't notice people who passed, and they hardly noticed him. They may have thought it was a loaded firearm. In Ohio, it's legal to carry firearms without a permit as long as they aren't concealed and you don't point at anyone.
One customer called police and falsely claimed he was pointing the gun at customers. On the phone, the victim's girlfriend heard him say, "It's not real!" just before he was shot dead. Those police shots caused a nearby woman to drop dead with a heart attack.
Walmart had 200 security cameras showing everything that happened. The investigating authorities confiscated the videos and instead filmed a reenactment the next morning. Out with the documentation, in with the fiction! They said the victim had done nothing wrong, but neither had police. Before the grand jury, the prosecutor acted instead as if he were the defense attorney for the police. There was no indictment.
Eventually, the authorities released video from one security camera. It showed that the victim hadn't pointed at anyone and was only vaguely aware of the pellet gun in his hand as he talked on the phone. Apparently police with rifles were on all sides, using shelves for cover, but the video shows only the shopper, minding his own business and suddenly shot. The sequence is sped up. Frames were probably removed.
Two months earlier, local police had completed a course in shooting gunmen. The cop yelled to drop the gun. The startled shopper's immediate reaction was that it was wrong to damage store merchandise by dropping it. He immediately said it wasn't real and was executed for failing to follow police training.
The idiocy higher up was worse. When police got the call, the commander should have called store security immediately, to prevent shoppers from going near the accused and to evaluate him with their 200 cameras. They could have saved the police death squad a trip. The sole customer who called police told the press he was an ex-Marine. Right. He'd been dishonorably discharged in boot camp.
And the Chasm goes both ways I guess... Red is part of how you make orange....
But if you push it into the barrel, the barrel is no longer the same size and it would (at the very least) alter the trajectory, wouldn't it?
Did you watch the video? Early in the video the kid points the gun directly at someone walking by on the street, from only a few feet away.
Now you know he was lonely? Good grief, what are you going to make up next?
At his age, he thought
It wasn't just a "simulated" firearm. It was an airgun that could easily put an eye out.
Police have a habit of doing that, especially when responding to a report of a crime.
The passenger cop said he shouted
It seems outlandish that a 12 year old kid would be out in public with an air pistol, pointing it at people too. But you have it in the video and also stated in the 911 call.
The
It's one possible explanation, but you have no way of knowing what the kid was thinking.
One major factor that reduced the time and distance was the kid clearly got up from the table and headed *toward* the police car as it approached.
They sell pellet guns to minors in OH?
How does one ascertain from a video that the guy was only "vaguely" aware of a pellet rifle that he was holding?
I found the video.
From what I can see there, it's hard to tell exactly what happened. Do you have a better video? And what evidence do you have that frames were removed, other than the time periods that are not shown, where the subject is off camera?
Somehow I think that's your conclusion. Is that what the cops testified to?
What do you expect? The media is focused on the nuts that shoot people in theaters, in schools, at workplaces, etc. They are still rare, but they cover enough of them that people are worried. I bet if you surveyed Walmart shoppers, most of them probably don't even know they sell guns. They see someone walking around with one in Walmart, they call 911. Factor in that now we have incidents where terrorist wannabees walk up to cops and kill them without warning, and you have a deadly mix. In this particular case, the police may have overreacted, but just from the video, I can't tell because what happened in the final couple of seconds isn't clear.
You could just put some orange paint or orange tape on the end of the barre l for starters. From even a short distance, if you were pulling that out of your jacket, I wouldn't expect most could tell the difference. You're left with figure it out, or possibly die.
The more I think about it, the more I think that orange tip thing is a bad idea. I wouldn't want to be a cop, have to use a gun to defend myself, because someone pulls a gun and points it at me, and then have the Monday morning quarterbacks accuse me of shooting an unarmed guy, because it turns out it was an airgun with an orange tip.
You don't have to push anything into the barrel. Just some orange paint or tape on the end of the barrel would do it. Or you could glue some plast ic attachement onto the outside of the gun at the tip. Cops, etc don't get to take the gun and look closely at it. If it's 10 ft away, just being pulled out of a pocket, the suspect is moving, it's not well lit, etc, you'd see orang e, but I doubt you'd be able to tell much else.
Very tough job, that of being a cop
but the bottom line is that if someone pulls a gun on you,the proper thing to do is to blast them.
When I was 12, I had a couple capguns that took ring caps. I didn't like the orange tip, so I drilled it out and blacked it with magic marker.
Col Burke will be interested to know that I busted a cap on a couple cops when I was 12, and that's how I ended up in a wheelchair in a long term care facility. With a team of nurses who have to change my Depends, cause I'm paralyzed from 7th vertebrae on down. No one knows who my Dad is, Mom was doing two guys, both in prison and refuse DNA test. Mom has to take the cross town bus on first of the month when get gets benefits, to visit me. Good thing she takes the bus, she's usually so fortied up she could not start the car or drive it. I don't see my three older brothers, from two other dads, they all get out in a couple years. My younger brother is in juvie.
The rest of you ignore that last bit. Carry on.
- . Christopher A. Young Learn about Jesus
We'll never know the intent. At 12, it could have been just a moving target in his fantasy game A cat or chipmunk would have been treated the same as he was fantasying saving the world from aliens.
Or, he may have wanted to scare the crap out of people.
Police can scare and confuse people too. They are trained to take charge and yell commands, such as "hands in the air". or "get down on the ground" I can imagine myself getting hurt by police if I was told to get on the ground because that is not so easy for me these days due to knee issues.
I just hope the investigation is able to clear up some of what really happened.
Real case, as hard as it is to believe.
I was a county dispatcher way back when in a very rural county. Had a rash of armed robberies at the 'stop-n-robs' (gas station convenience stores). One of he clerks said he was threatened with a yellow gun. Deputies "Yeah, riiiight..." About a week later a town cop stopped a vehicle just outside of town. Asked to search vehicle - permission granted. Open trunk and he is staring at a pistol painted yellow!
We never did get an explanation of why someone would do that.
I can't recall the name of the perp. Happened in Whitman County, Washington state back in the 80s.
Harry K
I don't see how anyone would want to be a cop now days. No mater what you do, you are wrong and will pay fo it one way or the other. The cop just resigned that shot that unarmed man. He will probably have to move to another town and hard telling what kind of job he may be able to get.
In a town I lived in there was a man driving a Swan truck selling food door to door. He was a cop and sprayed a man with mace. The man died and the cop was let go from the police department.
I always said that the cop should not be hardly able to touch you if you did what he says, but the second the person swings at the cop, it is justified in just shooting the person on the spot.
Why doesn't the kid have the right to shoot the cops who pointed their gun at him? Doesn't the kid have the right to protect his own life?
Perhaps not a bad result if that idea catches on. I was taught that anything obstructing the barrel is apt to cause the barrel to explode when the weapon is fired.
The kid's a casualty of the gun culture, simple as that.
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