PD Editorial: Toy guns and real-life tragedies

Should police officers making life-and-death decisions in a split-second be forced to distinguish between a real gun and realistic looking toy?

California lawmakers finally said no after the 2013 death of Andy Lopez in southwest Santa Rosa.

Lopez was carrying a replica AK-47, but the orange tip signifying a toy was gone, and Deputy Erick Gelhaus mistook it for a real assault weapon and shot the 13-year-old boy.

The shooting sent shockwaves across Sonoma County, but the circumstances are distressingly common across the country. Researchers with ties to law enforcement identified replica firearms as a public safety threat more than a quarter-century ago, but Congress failed to act on the warning -with deadly consequences.

In the past two years alone, the Washington Post reported this month, police officers in the United States have shot and killed at least 86 people who were carrying toy guns or pellet guns, some of them almost identical to real firearms.

That’s almost one such shooting every week - and close to 5?percent of all police shootings in the U.S. over that two-year period.

Almost half of the shootings with toy guns involved victims with mental health issues, and several have involved young teenagers.

These are tragedies for the officers as well as the victims, and many of these shootings - maybe even most - could be avoided with commonsense restrictions, not on firearms, but on toys.

“We’re talking about this 26 years later, and I’m not sure anything has really changed except that tragic occurrences continue to happen,” Chuck Wexler, who runs the Police Executive Research Forum, a police policy think tank, told the Post. “A toy gun in a country with 300 million real guns is hard to distinguish.”

Wexler speaks with authority on this subject. His organization assessed the danger posed by replica firearms in 1990, one of two such studies ordered by Congress as part of a 1988 law requiring an orange tip on most toy firearms.

The orange tips were mandated because of a rising number of police shootings involving toy guns. But both studies concluded that the tips wouldn’t be adequate for police officers to distinguish between a real gun and a replica.

Congress took no further action, in part because Second Amendment advocates and firearms manufacturers strongly opposed attempts to regulate the appearance of replica firearms, toys, BB guns and airsoft guns like the one carried by Andy Lopez.

After a teen with a toy gun was shot several years ago in Los Angeles, police Chief Charlie Beck pressed for a state law requiring that toys and replicas be brightly colored or have prominently displayed fluorescent strips. That measures failed, but a second attempt by Senate President Kevin de León and the-Sen. Noreen Evans succeed after the Lopez shooting. That law took effect this year, but it only covers replicas made or sold in California.

Sen. Barbara Boxer introduced a similar measure in Congress, but it got bogged down in committee, and her term is ending.

Sales of replica firearms and pellet guns are rising - “they are red hot,” an industry consultant told the Post - and police say it’s virtually impossible to train officers to identify them at a distance. The best protection is prevention. The new Congress isn’t likely to act on firearms safety, but it can make the police and the public safer by requiring that toy guns and pellet guns are designed so they can’t be mistaken for the real thing. Lives depend on it.