Tamir Rice Made A Fatal Mistake

Here's my take on the sad Tamir Rice shooting at the Cudell Rec Center. Excerpt from the report:

Police saw Tamir take what they believed was a pistol from a picnic table under a gazebo where he was sitting with a group and stuff the weapon in his waistband.

A first-year officer, who officials have not named, got out of his car and told the boy to raise his hands. Instead, police said he reached for what later proved to be an airsoft-type gun, a replica of a semi-automatic handgun that shoots pellets.

The officer fired two shots from less than 10 feet away. A least one of the bullets hit Tamir in the stomach. He was rushed to MetroHelath Medical Center in serious condition and died early Sunday.

Questions about the shooting arose when police revealed that the man who called 9-1-1 before the boy was shot told dispatchers "the gun was probably fake."

The caller told the dispatcher he saw "a guy with a pistol" on the swing set pulling a weapon from his pants and "scaring the s—t out of everyone."

Listening to a local Saturday call-in show on WTAM-1100, it would seem that almost everybody who can speak proper English and form an argument agrees that the primary reason that Tamir Rice is now dead is his own stupidity. There were blacks as well as whites calling in to lament the kid's stupidity, and most people mentioned that if you're a cop and you get called to Cudell no one should blame you for being ready to use your sidearm. It's a crime-ridden place.

I don't have much to add except to say two things. One, maybe the cop could have done something else. I'm sure that in hindsight he wishes he used a taser, or maybe used he x-ray bionic vision to determine that the Rice's pistol was only an airsoft gun. As Christopher Johnson from MCJ recently noted:

....You’ve got one second to decide what to do an a life-threatening situation. Well, I guess I should…time’s up. You’re dead.

But come to think of it, I don't know if the officer has a bionic eye. (Sounds like a question Don Lemon might ask, though.)

The second thing is that Tamir Rice's father should be absolutely ashamed of himself for not teaching his son that playing with guns (which have been doctored to look real) in public and not listening to policemen with real weapons will get you killed. I realize that his father, Leonard Warner, has a criminal history, but that should only make him more ashamed that he hadn't taught his son simple survival skills, and what a mistake it is to play chicken with the cops.

Someone should do a quick anecdotal study about how many of these kids involved in these high-profile shootings (Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, etc.) have the same last name as their father and mother. It seems like they all come from broken homes, which would seem to be a much stronger indicator than race.