Deputy who shot Santa Rosa boy identified

[jtuck004]

97. Think what you want, but you don't know what was in his mind. We threw his ass

into a wasted war in Afghanistan, then brought him back here and asked him to protect us in a uniform and marked car in which people, total strangers that he doesn't even know, would walk up and put a bullet in his head in a New York minute if they were in the right mood. He, and others doing that job take real guns off of people they search every week, some no older than this kid, some younger.

Then one day he is driving down the street and sees a figure with a gun. He tells him to drop it, and the person turns toward him with the assault weapon, the kind he had faced more than once, I expect, by people who were trying to kill him, in his hand. Apparently to...what? And if you are wrong someone else is dead.

Damn right 7 shots - that's barely 2 or 3 seconds, and you want to put them down. Now. And you fire until they go down. So he probably had two or three rounds left, depending on the magazine he had. Because the alternative is that an innocent bystander dies, your partner dies, or you die. That is their training. If you shoot, you shoot to stop them, you don't shoot a bullet and then wait to see if they can still kill people before you shoot another. It's not 1 Adam 12, it's real.

How the his parents ever let Andy walk out of the house with that thing uncovered is hard to fathom. People are killed for their shoes, for a few bucks, for a perceived slight every day. And walking around with a real-looking rifle is just another way to get shot - think someone wouldn't have shot his ass just to get his gun? Heck, there are shooters out there that would have done it KNOWING it was a toy, just because they wanted it.

Is it a tragedy? Damn right. A 13 year old kid with, what the cop didn't know, that we now know, was a toy gun, is dead. Was it avoidable? Sure - stop making toy guns in a country which already has nearly a gun for EVERY citizen, nearly twice as many guns as the next two places on the list, Serbia and Yemen, for cryin'' out loud. But the answer is not to listen to a bunch of self-righteous people who like to hear themselves talk, with complaints and no solutions, who completely ignore the fact that they have the luxury of time and information that he didn't have, who think they are better than him while they sit on their asses and make comments in the safety of their computer hole.

Anyone who says they can make a better judgment call in that situation is a disingenuous phony and a liar. Along with anyone who says they know what was in that cops head.

Too damn many cops are bullies these days, too damn many cops pull out a gun when they should be relying on less lethal means. Period. But when we allow gun manufacturers to create toys that look just like deadly weapons (the pics were made public, next to a real assault weapon. Damn little difference, and nothing to distinguish it as a toy), and we haven't got the guts to go up against the real power, the corporations, (whether they are the banker/donors to the Democratic party or the mfrs of these killer toys) then the spineless, gutless, and greedy society that allows it has no business calling for someone else to make impossible judgment calls which they themselves couldn't even hope to do.