And no gun ever will.
Yet my very own mother said yesterday that the manufacturer of the BB gun being brandished by 13-year-old Tyre King up in Cleveland — the brandishing that got him shot and killed by a police officer who was in legitimate fear for his life — should be held responsible for Tyre’s death, because they marketed a BB gun that looked like a real gun.*
Excuse me, but no. Because BB guns and Airsoft guns are not marketed as toys, it seems to me that they fall under the same exemption codified in the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (15 USC §§ 7901-7903) which protects firearm manufacturers and dealers from being held liable when crimes are committed using their products.** I am not a lawyer, but come on. If it’s marketed as a legitimate weapon, even if it’s not a firearm, any halfway decent lawyer could show that the sale of such non-gunpowder arms falls under “commerce in arms”.
If such guns were marketed as toys, Federal law would require them to have an orange tip. Naturally, there’s nothing stopping an idiot from removing the orange tip from a toy gun, or painting it to match the rest of the gun, but as noted, that would be something an idiot would do. But in this case, there was no legal requirement for the BB gun in Tyre’s possession to look anything like a toy.
What I find as a wonder is that the Black Lives Matter folks have avoided making a spectacle out of this shooting. That’s probably because the 19-year-old who was with Tyre King didn’t try to bluff it out, but admitted up front that they were out to rob people. Whether or not he is telling the truth that the whole thing was Tyre’s idea (which is truly doubtful in my mind, and of course Tyre isn’t around to defend himself anymore), he did the people of Cleveland a significant service with the basic admission that they were out and about for nefarious purposes.
You know that the cop who shot Tyre is having a very bad time. Nobody wants to shoot a kid. But when you point something that looks like a real gun at a cop, you shouldn’t expect the cop not to shoot you.
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* I’m not going to go into why BB gun and Airsoft manufacturers feel the need to make their products look like real guns. Personally I think that’s fucking stupid, and leads to EXACTLY the kind of misapprehension that got Tyre King killed. You can put warnings in the manuals and on the packaging all you want, but all it takes is one stupid kid taking your product and pointing at someone who thinks it’s a real weapon to make everyone — and that should include 2A supporters — wonder why it’s really necessary for a BB pistol to look just like a Glock 19 (or whatever). If I owned the company that sold that BB pistol, I’d be having just as much trouble sleeping as the cop who shot Tyre King, right now. And that’s even knowing that a well-placed BB can hurt someone pretty damn badly. “You’ll shoot your eye out.”
** Note, however, that the Act does not protect firearm manufacturers or dealers from being held liable for damages in purely consumer, civil, or criminal areas. You can still sue $FIREARM_MANUFACTURER for making shitty pistols. A dealer can still be charged with knowingly selling weapons to unqualified persons (e.g., felons, or straw purchasers), particularly if the sale was made with reason to know that the weapon would be used to commit a crime.