22 Replies to “O, Sweet Saint Of San Andreas”

  1. I’m 60 years old. When I was 13, my friends and I used to sling our .22 rifles over our shoulders and ride our bikes to an old quarry outside town, where we would have fun shooting targets. Now I guess if a kid were to do that he’d get shot by the cops. Is that progress?

  2. The stupidity is that in many places he could be carrying a real one. Send some cops to jail for shooting kids. The A Holes probably didn’t challenge him before shooting and like 6 year olds they blamed the kid they just beat up or in this case killed..

  3. I guess they’ll also have to pass a complementary law banning real firearms that look like toys; you know, so the cops can make those split-second decisions.

  4. I don’t know the exact circumstances,so won’t speculate as to why the cop shot the kid. Maybe the cop has watched too many TV shows and thought the kid looked like a terrorist,complete with black sweater and toque. Who knows.
    I have seen many toy guns that I thought shouldn’t be sold,way too realistic. The manufacturers, knowing very well the prevailing mentality toward guns, should have more sense than to make a toy that looks real. They put these things on the market knowing damned well this type of thing can happen,and I wonder which political Party they endorse.
    Mike,when I was a kid,we used to walk through town on the way to the hunting areas without getting even a glance from the local constabulary, but 2013 big city America,and Canada, isn’t small town Manitoba in 1958.

  5. Here’s an amusing side effect: when I was in university Ontario brought this same law in. The result was that theater and film students could no longer nip down to the Toys R’ Us and buy a cheap toy off the rack, paint it up a little and have a realistic looking prop. They had to rent or buy $400 theater prop-quality replicas.

  6. The cop’s name is Eric Gelhaus, he has written articles for SWAT magazine. There is evidence the boy was shot while he was face-down on the ground and the parent’s are suing for wrongful death.
    I recently read that in the USA, an innocent person is eight times more likely to be killed by the police than a terrorist. Considering the two women whose Toyota was riddled by LA cops looking for a large black man in a Nissan (Chris Dorner) and how many dogs have been shot by cops who ‘feared for their safety’ from a Jack Russell, I believe it.

  7. When I went to school in rural Alberta and we wanted a gun for a play at school, we brought a gun to school. You may not believe this but the kid bringing a gun to school for a play isn’t going to kill anyone. It’s the kid society bruises and abuses or is otherwise nuts. Nobody is ever surprised when the crazy kids shoot up a school.

  8. I wonder if the kid didn’t speak English ?
    Well, anyway, in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s it was quite common in the South, especially during hunting season, to see a couple of shotguns in the rear window of a truck.

  9. Next up on the agenda, the last few remaining Republicans in California will be forced by law to wear bright red armbands when in public so they can be easily identified…wait, wasn’t that what those really bad guys did, who were they again…I am trying to remember…weren’t they the Nazis?

  10. What’s next in California?
    The banning of fake breasts?
    They probably have ruined more families in California than fake guns…

  12. Shooting a citizen for merely holding a firearm, or what might be a firearm, is the Rule of Engagement of a military(or in this case para-military) is an active war zone.
    That the police in North American, both the U.S. and Canada, view ordinary citizens as the “enemy”, and themselves, not as Peace Officers, but as para-military is a violation of the principles upon which our free and democratic societies were founded.

  13. While everyone is laughing at the silly Californians, I should point out that a similar law has been in affect in Canada since 1998. From the RCMP’s own webpage: “A replica firearm is a device that is not a real firearm, but that was designed to look exactly or almost exactly like a real firearm.”
    Replica firearms are prohibited devices in Canada.”
    “Replica firearms should be stored and transported carefully to keep them out of the hands of someone who might misuse them.”
    The charge is “Possession of a Prohibited Device”. You are looking at 3 years Federal time.

  14. Yep.  I remember in the 80s back in Edmonton you could buy Japanese plastic model kits of various more-or-less popular sidearms, and create an assembled model that looked (and in some cases, could even be racked) just like the real thing.  There was one toy store in West Edmonton Mall that used to have quite the selection of kits.  You could also buy non-operational replicas of the real thing from certain gun shops (usually had things like the receiver disabled and permanently welded into the sidearm’s body).
    Needless to say, the local constabulary tended to get a little freaky about these.  😉
    Nowadays, you can still buy Red Gunsâ„¢ and/or Blue Gunsâ„¢ (at least on those days when the RCMP have decided that they do not meet the definition of “replica firearm” in the Firearms Act, the Criminal Code, and/or any associated Regulations thereunto).  These are urethane-moulded simulated sidearms and assault weapons in bright red or bright blue, with zero moving parts.  God help you if you decide to paint ’em and get caught, though…

  15. Reminds me somewhat of a story my dad told me. When he was a kid, about 6 or 7, he and his friends would take their cap guns to the matinee at the local theatre when a western was being shown. They would shoot off their cap guns and make an awful racket.
    Nowadays, of course, their cap guns would be confiscated and banned, and some social worker would have to interview the parents so they could explain why their child was so violent and involved in the gun culture.
    In my dad’s day the kids had to check their guns in with the theatre “sheriff” and before they could go watch the matinee, and they were then returned to the kids on their way out.

  16. You have to ask yourself. When the police now shut down lemonade stands. arrest 5 year old s for kissing. Shoot kids with obvious toy guns. How long before they start tasering 2 years old kids in diaper’s for resisting arrest?
    Its gotten that bad with the wimps now wearing uniforms.
    They seem to be in fear all the time from to many sensitivity training sessions on how to treat Muslims with kid gloves while making the public tax payer the real enemy.
    Cowardice without thought, kills.

  17. Pellet rifles and BB guns are not toys. They can be used to kill small game and can seriously injure a person. So I don’t know why this proposed regulation seems to think that this has something to do with “toys.”
    That said, we need an attitude adjusment on the mob that controls the cops. The cops just do as they are told and if they are shooting kids carrying BB guns, it is because the leftist mob has taken over city hall and are telling the cops, implicitly or explicitly, to shoot kids with guns – any gun.
    I used to sling the .22 and peddle out of town with my buddies to shoot gophers circa 1973. The local farmers liked having us around. The cops, and everyone else, would ignore us. Growing up shooting a pellet rifle and then a .22, I quickly discovered it wasn’t the guns that were dangerous, it was the people carrying them. And like car drivers, it wasn’t until these clowns were around a gun for a bit that we began to discover who was competent and who wasn’t. The competent ones became safe and responsible shooters. The incompetent and dangerous ones soon gave up. Quite often, I remember, because they were incapable of zeroing the sights on their rifles.

  18. Sure. Outlaw pellet guns. That’ll fix things.
    Like outlawing dildos in Ontario would have saved us from McD8nky

  19. There is such a aversion to guns in the entire urban education system that I wonder where the next generation of police and military is expected to come from ? Looks like rural kids will be expected to shoulder the responsibility simply because they haven’t been completely brainwashed and still see rifles and guns as tools. By the time urban kids are through with all the bullying programs they will be even more useless than they are now. Special snowflakes and programmed weenies don’t do much for the countries safety.

  20. Larry, excellent point. The police should be forced to state what ROE they are operating under at all times. If their ROE are to shoot anyone who’s armed, but not a member of the police, then the first action of anyone who supposedly controls that police force should be to disband the local police force. Under the same ROE, anyone who’s committed an armed robbery would immediately shoot to kill any police who happened to be in the area as this is the most rational thing to do in such a situation.
    The militarized police need some hard lessons to teach them that they are not in a war zone and that they are soldier wannabees. Their role is to keep the peace and arrest criminals: a person carrying a gun is not a criminal unless that person uses it in a criminal manner. There are lots of perfectly legitimate reasons to carry a gun and, in a more civilized era, the cops didn’t give us a second glance as we cycled out past the Calgary city limits with our .22’s slung over our backs to shoot gophers. If we had hunted gophers within the Calgary city limits, they would have been justified in arresting us but we always made sure we were well past that invisible boundary. We also took our rifles to school and no-one seemed the least bit perturbed.
    What I’ve noticed lately is that there seem to be very few cops who have had any personal experience with getting into schoolyard scraps and the vast majority have never been in a fight in their lives. By getting into a lot of fights, one quickly learns to gauge who’s harmless and who’s dangerous. My last two hospital near physical encounters involved a large guy who’d been drinking hand sanitizer (65% ethanol) and my gut feeling was that this guy was totally unstable and I had no hesitation committing him under the mental health act and loading him up with haloperidol. The other guy I got called to deal with last week was considered “dangerous” because he pulled an exacto knife on a patient in an argument. No-one got hurt, the guy was delerious and it didn’t take me long to ascertain he wasn’t a fighter. To placate the nurses and security guards I loaded him up with olanzapine but all it would have taken to control him was a security guard physically larger than him (why they persist in hiring female and short security guards is beyond me).
    If the police had been involved, the minimum response they would have taken would have been to tazer these guys and, given that one of them had a “weapon”, probably shoot the second guy. While my kick boxing skills are getting a bit rusty now, I still have no hesitation in directly dealing with situations where my gut tells me that I’m OK to wade in. It may be survivorship bias as I’ve had to deal with a very large number of violent crazy people during my medical career, but not once would I have considered use of lethal force appropriate in these situations. Once I had to put my full weight on my elbow which was on a huge violent loggers trachea which quickly subdued him before he could do any damage. Once he recovered from his brain injury secondary to a tree falling on his head he was a very pleasant fellow who, fortunately, didn’t remember a thing about how I subdued him.
    The only solution I can see is to disarm N. American police. Considering that one is far more likely to be shot by a policeman in N. America than a criminal or a terrorist, it’s quite clear that police should be forced to work unarmed so that they can develop some skills in minimally violent means of defusing situations. Considering that when a member of the police shoots and kills someone that they are almost never charged, the solution is to not let them carry guns. Citizens with CCW are held to a far higher standard of conduct and virtually all of their uses of firearms are completely justified as they know very well that any misuse of their firearms will result in murder charges against them. Maybe having the cops disarmed for a few years would result in a situation where they accepted a deal where they would get their guns back under the same legal liabilities currently applicable to individuals with CCW. Bringing back fighting in school would be a good way of training future policemen but likely a rather politically incorrect policy in todays “zero tolerance” policy for “violence”.

  21. We have a “cop” problem, not a toy gun problem – off target legislating like this is a prime example of the neurotic pointless dithering of modern political culture – it shows us we are over governed by people unfit to make rational decisions in our best interests.
    If Calif. state government closed indefinitely tomorrow, the state would rebound by reasoning grassroots people filling the void in directing their their life/affairs with rational action based in ethical personal and collective self-interest. Collectivist statist governing is a lost cause from the get go because it is never directed at the good of the majority but at the lowest common denominator in society – in this case brain-dead trigger happy thugs who are employed by law enforcement who can’t tell a toy from a weapon and who will reflexively kill a child to satisfy some paranoid notion of their own omnipotent righteousness.

  22. Loki: Excellent insight, great post.
    Was a time when our police were watchdogs – barking at people who disturbed the peace or violated local ordinances, only biting (by way of a citation)in the event of repeated transgressions or serious offenses. No longer. Their masters have transformed them into slavering wolves carefully selected to unquestionably follow orders, biting and attacking hapless citizens at every opportunity.
    Resistance can lead to electrocution and/or lead poisoning. ASIRT (Alberta Serious Incident Response Team) has yet to blame any officer for inappropriate action, despite evidence to the contrary.
    The black uniform and the mustache are just part of their regimen of power and intimidation .

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