When I was a kid, I did a lot of stupid stuff. Being Gen X, we were raised on hose water, Pop-Tarts cold from the foil, and a fair bit of neglect. We did the kind of things that we would never allow our own children to do after we grew up because we watched as the weak among us appeared on Unsolved Mysteries, as nature demanded. We were morons, and we didn’t want to let our kids be morons, too.
Unfortunately, some kids are morons, and just like what happened with some in our generation, a few aren’t going to make it to adulthood because of being morons.
That’s especially true when it’s something that is as obviously dangerous as pointing a gun-shaped object at people.
A juvenile is facing criminal charges after allegedly threatening shoppers with a replica handgun at a WinCo Foods store in Brush Prairie early Saturday morning.
Deputies with the Clark County Sheriff’s Office responded to the grocery store, located at the intersection of Northeast 119th Street and Northeast 117th Avenue, just before 1 a.m. on Aug. 8. Multiple callers had reported that a youth was threatening people inside the store with what appeared to be a pistol.
The juvenile idiot refused to comply with police and took off. He got tased, arrested, and it was learned that it was an Airsoft gun designed to look like a Glock.
I know that you all know what I’m about to say is true, but I’m asking you to share this story far and wide, because the general public needs to understand just why this was incredibly stupid. Parents and children need to understand completely why this was such a moronic thing to do.
An Airsoft Glock shoots 7mm plastic BBs at people. They’re not fatal except in weird circumstances, but that barrel diameter is just two millimeters smaller than a Glock 17 or 19 or any other 9mm handgun in existence.
If you point it at me in a threatening manner, I’m not going to pull out a set of calipers and measure the bore. I’m going to react to what I see as a threat, draw my gun, and I will shoot whoever has threatened me and mine. I’m going to put rounds on target to the best of my ability until I no longer see a threat, and as a civilian, I’m under no obligation to order someone to drop their weapon.
As this was in the state of Washington, which doesn’t have an explicit Stand Your Ground law, some might think it’s not a big deal, but court precedent there says there’s no duty to retreat, which means this kid could easily have been killed for this, and whoever did it would walk.
Further, the law will not care that it wasn’t a real gun. This kid was arrested despite it being an Airsoft because threatening people with a gun, even a completely non-lethal one, is a crime. Unfortunately, as Cam pointed out earlier today, Washington’s broken juvenile justice system will probably spit this kid back onto the streets in no time even though this is a crime that could get someone killed.
Had the juvenile in this case pointed the gun at the cops, he might well have ended up in the morgue instead of jail. If he pointed that gun at an armed citizen, he probably would have ended up there even faster.
Kids, do not make your mothers and fathers mourn you because you decided to point a gun-shaped object at innocent people for kicks. Of all the stupid stuff we did in my day, I sure as hell knew better than to do that. I was blessed with a police officer father, though. He pointed these things out to me, so now I’m asking parents to point them out to their children.
I don’t like seeing the outrage from a kid being shot because he thinks he’s protected from it because his gun isn’t real. I don’t like what it does to the kid’s parents or to the officers who pulled the trigger. No one wins, least of all the dead kid.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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