Why exactly was a 12 year old who was the height & weight of the average adult male allowed to play with even a toy gun in a public park?
This kid wasn’t a sweet little boy in the pre & grammar school years making the shape of a gun with his fingers, but a middle schooler the size of an adult, & many don’t know much about firearms.
For those wanting to make race an issue, I’d note the height & make the comparison to an adult if Tamir Rice was white or from any other group.
Children are children all throughout this world and should be protected. Adults do not “have” to shoot children. They choose to. They need to slow down and assess the situation before shooting instead of having this “fear” they report having and use as a legal defense.
And no, I wouldn’t do the same thing. Never in a million years.
If these decisions cannot be made they don’t belong in law enforcement. Just admit that the real problem is the lack of respect for human life. Kill, kill, kill, that’s always their solution when it is needless.
What kind of sheltered neighborhood did you grow up in? At around the same age my friends and I had pellet guns that were very real looking replicas.They even had clips to load. We carried those guns around all over the place and shot at targets in the woods. We also had large replica Rambo knives that we bought from the flea market (the things they used to sell kids back then lol). I’m just glad there were no cowardly trigger-happy cops blasting first and asking questions later.
The kids in my “sheltered neighborhood”, which was on a rural area, had outgrown toy guns at 12. And they wouldn’t have been playing with one around a police officer.
Why can’t they play cowboys and Indians or some other silly childhood game around officer friendly without the fear of officer friendly getting scared and shooting them?
I’ve known men who reached close to average adult height in the early teens, & managed to get jobs before it’s even legal with a parent signed permit. No one even asked their age.