Big yucks all around. Some people think it's really funny pointing fake guns at people, like a certain unstable fellow up in Maine. Or someone invited as a guest to the president of the University of Pennsylvania. Or a 15 year old "prankster" in Iowa. He was having some "fun" pointing a BB gun at passing cars. Which apparently amused him until the wrong car drove past. Because the occupants of the car weren't laughing.
When they pulled out their real guns.
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – A teenager pointed his BB pistol at the wrong car. The car stopped and the two men inside pulled out their real .40-caliber Glock handguns. They were undercover police driving an unmarked car.
They ordered Ryon Shelton, 15, of Cedar Rapids, to drop his gun, police said.
"They thought it was a real gun," police Lt. Kenneth Washburn said. "He dropped the gun and attempted to run and was apprehended."
Shelton told officers he was "just playing around" and trying to scare people during the Halloween night incident, police said.
Well, actually a BB gun is a real gun, it's just not a firearm. Aside from that, the officers did exactly what they were supposed to do when they saw someone with a gun. They have to assume the threat is real. The fact of the matter is that if the teenager had not dropped the gun or had swung it toward the officers, this story might have an even worse ending for everybody. The same thing with the lawyer and the party guest, by the way. My kids were taught never to point even a toy gun at someone.
Suicide by cop, or just Darwin in action,…
The thing with the mock terrorist at the party,.. I’m always stunned at how tone deaf some university professors are to what’s right and wrong. As if they found qualifiers to say, this crime is always wrong, except when commited in service to a radical cause that I support.
My training was light infantry, with a primary sideline of anti-terrorist. I’m intolerant in the extreme of radical chic. I usually was assigned as aggressor, the bad guy in war game exercises. So I was taught the basics of how to be a terrorist in order to prepare ourselves to fight it.
I won’t say exactly what that entailed, but just that I was good at it, how anyone could find it reasonable as a tactic….
I’m at a loss as to how to process that kind of thinking.