Our view: Parents must talk with their kids

Our view: Parents must talk with their kids

If the line between toy guns and the real thing hasn’t vanished, it at least has been blurred.



That’s largely due to the emergence of BB guns and air rifles that resemble actual guns — all the way down to serial numbers. In too many



instances in recent years, these toy guns have alarmed bystanders and, even worse, led police to shoot the people carrying them.



When a 13-year-old Massillon boy walked into a Marathon convenience store in Jackson Township on Tuesday, he frightened employees as he twirled what appeared to be an automatic pistol and removed and replaced its BB container, according to The Rep’s Edd Pritchard.



It’s unclear what were the boy’s intentions. He already had stolen the BB gun from the Wal-Mart in The Strip shopping plaza. And he had taken merchandise from the convenience store without paying for it, according to police.



Officers tracked down the boy after he snuck out a back door. What followed was an exchange that could have taken a terrible turn for both the boy and police.



In this case, the gun likely posed a bigger threat to the boy carrying it than to the people he exposed it to and possibly intended to intimidate. It’s indistinguishable from the Sig Sauer 226 that it’s designed to resemble. Police officers, who carry the real thing, are trained that if they cannot determine if a firearm is fake, they have to operate under the assumption that it’s real.



Fortunately, the boy complied with officers’ orders when they came face to face. This incident, with the exception of its outcome, sounds eerily similar to the tragic death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice at the hands of Cleveland police in 2014.



Unlike other states, Ohio has no law regulating these toy guns. Federal law only requires that they include an orange tip, which often is removed, as it was in this case. And while federal law prohibits the sale of these toy guns to anyone under age 18, they sit on store shelves, no more difficult to grab than toilet paper or toothpaste.



We commend Jackson police officers for safely de-escalating this situation. On a daily basis, police officers evaluate threats and make split-second decisions to keep the community safe. This shouldn’t be one of the decisions they’re forced to make.



With the growing popularity of these toy guns comes the added responsibility of educating users about when and where they should be carried and how best they should be used — if used at all. Whether they keep toy guns and real guns in their home or forbid them altogether, parents must talk with their children about the risks associated with these replica weapons.



They might not be powerful enough to inflict serious injury or kill someone, but the panic they can create when carried in public can lead to fatal consequences.