please don't burn down my city too

erohslc wrote: All I can say is, just watch the video. Don't listen to Fox News. Don't listen to MSNBC. Imagine your child playing alone in a park with a toy gun.

You are letting your child play like that with a toy gun in a public park YOU should have been shot as well. That's just plain poor parenting there. "Here Johnny, go take this real looking toy gun and go scare people in the park by waving it around and pointing it at them. Then when the cops show up make you you reach for it real quick!"

berkeleying Brilliant parenting there. The good news is enough of that and we'll thin out the idiots.

Shocked by some of the comments . . .

I take it by some of the comments "Cops and Robbers" are games some never had the chance to play . . . How about all of cap guns from "Cowboys and Indians"?

I didn't realize at 12 years old we always did everything our parents asked.

Dude, I stayed out of this for awhile but.... I had those guns out of boys life that are/were impossibly real. I even had the police called on me and my buddy while we were running through a junkyard shooting each other. The cop corralled us and asked to see the guns. Checked them out compared his service pistol to the one my buddy was carrying and explained that it was waaaay to realistic and we needed to think about what we were doing. Looking back it could have gone differently but really; 12-15 year olds should be given a chance to show their childishness.

Rash decisions on both sides cop came up guns blazing, kid tries to pull the gun.... Not smart either way.

that's all well and good until you consider that it's no way unheard of for 12 yr olds to be shooting up neighborhoods … not the norm, but certainly not so unusual that an officer walking up on a suspect that reaches under his shirt as it to draw would start laughing and shaking his head while walking on up to the kid

No disagreement; however, the people saying "bad parenting" allowing their kids to have realistic guns is unrealistic. It is also far fetched to think driving up like he did (bad info definitely plays into this) is the optimal way to handle it. He didn't have the experience that New York cop did twenty-twenty five years ago to look at what he was driving up on and make an informed decision.

wbjones wrote: that's all well and good until you consider that it's no way unheard of for 12 yr olds to be shooting up neighborhoods … not the norm, but certainly not so unusual that an officer walking up on a suspect that reaches under his shirt as it to draw would start laughing and shaking his head while walking on up to the kid

This is the real problem. I'll be damned if I know what's gone wrong, but when I was 10 my dad taught me to shoot. With a real gun. Like a 30.06. By age 12 I had my own .410 shotgun. It was UNHEARD of for kids to be shooting up neighborhoods; it just didn't happen. Kids, both black and white, carried shotguns to my high school in the trunks of cars because they'd go hunting afterwards; they hung on racks in pickups, too. No one got shot in school.

But now it's not terribly unusual to hear of young kids as runners and enforcers for dope dealers, they get a slap on the hand and are handed back to whoever's doing the parenting gig for them. Hell, 'Breaking Bad' even did a couple of episodes around it (and no I am not suggesting that is real life). So now a cop is supposed to confront a kid with a very realistic looking 'toy' gun and say 'well, he's a kid, that means it must be OK'. Uh, no; doesn't mean that any more.

The problem with the "When I was a kid" mentality is that for a lot of the people saying that, when they were kids, people weren't raised from birth listening to gangsta rap. Young kids are very moldable, when they grow up listening to that, they're going to think that being confrontational with police is acceptable, and that being arrested/getting jailed is simply an inevitable consequence of life, because that's just how the world works.

The counterpoint is, to quote Dale Gribble, "I blame the media-blamers." Is the media the problem or is the media a symptom of a cultural failure? How much is one feeding the other? How does the cycle stop?

Strike_Zero wrote: Shocked by some of the comments . . . I take it by some of the comments "Cops and Robbers" are games some never had the chance to play . . . How about all of cap guns from "Cowboys and Indians"?

you're unfortunately drawing a false equivalency with this abbreviated comparison. The act of engaging in pretend play is not the sole contributing factor of what resulted in this incident, as you're presenting it alone here.

however I understand your shock because you're viewing the comments as a lack of compassion for what happened.

But that is generally not a lack of compassion on the part of the commentors: but their anger that the child was not better equipped by people who DID know better.

none of the people, as near as i can tell, are laying any moral responsibility upon this child for the outcome, only the practical responsibility.

Sad to say that chandler and his buddy would have likely been plugged for playing Like that these days.

Knurled wrote: The problem with the "When *I* was a kid" mentality is that for a lot of the people saying that, when they were kids, people weren't raised from birth listening to gangsta rap.

Well, When I was a kid..... growing up on the west side of cleveland in the 80's, in a predominantly middle class racially mixed neighborhood, I was ambushed and shot at by a group of older kids, because i went to catholic school and they had it in for me. The police didn't get involved, the neighbor did, and nobody ever messed with me again until we moved out of that neighborhood. We didn't have the gangsta rap culture in the 80's, and the kid that took the shot at me was white as snow. I know where I came from, and I get sad when i see bad things happen in my city.

On that note, I'm proud of the way Cleveland as a whole reacted to the verdict.

Damn, gangsta rap ain't got nothin to do with it. Just like video games and movies. My kid watches me play COD and mortal kombat. He knows that E36 M3 is not real. And he's 4.

I was raised around gangsta rap amongst other genre's, let's not blame music!

FWIW - when I was a kid, I made a crossbow for a history class and was encouraged by TEACHERS to fire it in the hallway. Er, no, I ain't gonna do that.

Another teacher annually brought a musket to school and fired it in one of the back fields.

(also, a student was found B&E with a handgun in his pocket. Don't know what happened with that, other than my girlfriend was rattled all to hell by it)

The sad thing is, it is a cultural problem. We had a Indianapolis officer killed last year by a degenerate POS, and then we had to listen to the perp's family say "Well it never would have happened if the cop hadn't gotten out of his car" on the local news......wtf do you think their job is????

Curmudgeon wrote: But now it's not terribly unusual to hear of young kids as runners and enforcers for dope dealers, they get a slap on the hand and are handed back to whoever's doing the parenting gig for them. Hell, 'Breaking Bad' even did a couple of episodes around it (and no I am not suggesting that is real life).

Huh?

You say it's not unusual for X, they even showed it on a popular TV show, but I'm not suggesting X is real life.

Thanks guys, I'm not laying blame in any direction. I wasn't there, it's not my place. The video absolutely shows the officer acting on a bad tip, he was prepared for an outcome before he got there. Not good or bad just what happened. The kid had a realistic looking toy gun, he acted like a kid. Stupid to reach for it in any way when cops are rolling up, but he did. Cop already had his info and made his decision based on that. Rough area, tough decisions.

At this point, what do "we" do to keep this circumstance from happening again?

In reply to madmallard:

Nope . . . no false equivalency.

That's was best way of showing restraint for the words I really wanted use (but would only send the thread into a death spiral).

If we apply some of the thinking communicated in this thread . . . It's best for to

madmallard wrote:

Strike_Zero wrote: Shocked by some of the comments . . . I take it by some of the comments "Cops and Robbers" are games some never had the chance to play . . . How about all of cap guns from "Cowboys and Indians"?

you're unfortunately drawing a false equivalency with this abbreviated comparison. The act of engaging in pretend play is not the sole contributing factor of what resulted in this incident, as you're presenting it alone here. however I understand your shock because you're viewing the comments as a lack of compassion for what happened. But that is generally not a lack of compassion on the part of the commentors: but their anger that the child was not better equipped by people who DID know better. none of the people, as near as i can tell, are laying any moral responsibility upon this child for the outcome, only the practical responsibility.

This.

In reply to Bobzilla:

I am still more outraged over random shiny happy people calling in fake "active shooter" 911 calls when they see anyone legally carrying a firearm......I want to be able to press charges against those people legally and civilly.

yamaha wrote: In reply to Bobzilla: I am still more outraged over random shiny happy people calling in fake "active shooter" 911 calls when they see anyone legally carrying a firearm......I want to be able to press charges against those people legally and civilly.

There's that too. But a child, left running around with a realistic gun pointing it and acting stpis with it in public requires some parental shaming IMO.

Bobzilla wrote: ...There's that too. But a child, left running around with a realistic gun pointing it and acting stpis with it in public requires some parental shaming IMO.

That's kind of funny. I remember doing almost exactly that with a friend when I was a kid... in Oakland (hills) . No one really had a problem with it ("bang your dead, don't tell anyone")

Different times I guess. If a cop rolled up on us though, you can be damn sure we would not have played the same game with him!!!

Not sure if the gun was "realistic". As I remember, it was meant to look like a blaster from StarWars (which look like a Mauser machine pistol)

In reply to aircooled:

Oh, it was realistic looking 1911 airsoft pistol with the orange safety cap removed......there's no "It didn't even look like a real gun" bullE36 M3 to play here. Airsoft replicas can be very very close appearance wise to the real deal....

I've been reading this and wasn't going to comment...but... I grew up in the '70's in a not so nice area of Chicago. We had drug dealers, we had gangs, we had all kinds of people you didn't want to hang out with. But I'd take that any day over what we have today in the same areas. Even our toy guns didn't look as real as what some do today, but we played with them anyway. It was about 50-50 black vs. white then too, with no racial problems to speak of. We all played together. I'm sure the parents may have faced racial issues, but as kids, we didn't know it.

When I was 10, I got a real gun and was taught how to shoot by my parents. By the time I was 16, I had something like a dozen or so. So did many of my friends. We used to go shooting all the time, sometimes with just my friends and not any parents. We even had a flat once in my buddy's Pinto wagon, and a cop pulled up to help. We must have had something like 30 or more guns in the back, and other than a few questions about where we were going, there were no issues.

Today, that would not be the case. The truth is, it is simply more violent. Cops today face issues that were not nearly as bad back then on a day to day basis. They may have had instances that were as rough once is a while, but nothing like what everyday is in these areas now.

As a friend that's a cop likes to say, you never know what kid is going to pull a gun on you shoot you. They've taken real guns off kids as young as 6, many times after they have been fired. This is a real problem in this country.

This is not to dismiss this shooting, but to say we have serious problems that go far beyond what the cops are doing. I believe there are many reasons of course. The destruction of the family unit, many no-father homes, extreme poverty, and our society painting everyone as a victim with no role of responsibility. And there are the schools, which I think have broken down to be almost useless in some of these cities. Our entire school system now is to the point of needing a complete overhaul.

Sorry for the length, and I could go on, but no one in the media or governments (federal, state or local) want to face the very serious issues that are causing all of this. They simply want the votes by pandering to groups and keeping them in this same crap, all the while blaming their political adversaries. Given where I grew up, I'm very passionate about this.

In reply to racerdave600:

Even though we sometimes disagree upon smaller details, we agree on the bigger issues.

racerdave600 wrote: Today, that would not be the case. The truth is, it is simply more violent. Cops today face issues that were not nearly as bad back then on a day to day basis. They may have had instances that were as rough once is a while, but nothing like what everyday is in these areas now.

Mind backing that up? So far as I know, violent crime in general has been consistently dropping since the 70s.