Who Failed Tamir Rice?

The family, the culture that was not there to properly supervise a "little boy" playing with toy guns.  Someone, like a father, ought to have taught the boy NEVER EVER to point a realistic looking gun at another person.  Not to wave it around it a park, not to remove the consumer safety mandated toy gun tip.

Also the dispatcher who failed to relay that the caller expressed concern about the APPEARANCE of a threat, based on an unsupervised potential child playing with a potential toy gun, who did not have anyone close to him take the realistic-looking weapon out of his hand, and give him something else to play with.

(It's too bad the caller was not courageous enough to holler out to the person she saw waving the gun around that if it was a toy, he ought to put it away in public because someone could get the wrong idea and call the cops on him as a potential threat.  I thought families and communities raised kids, not cops.)

I blame the officer who pulled up close, and gave his partner no chance to assess the situation.

But I sure don't blame the guy who fired at someone pulling a gun out of his waistband when the cop car pulled up.  Sad that the kid didn't know better, and nobody apparently loved him enough to take the toy out of his hand and paint it yellow, say, before returning it to him to "play" with...

Maybe we ought to mandate a gun safety class in every classroom in America, so the children are properly educated on how to protect themselves?

The fundamental NRA rules for safe gun handling are:

• ALWAYS keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. This is the primary rule of gun safety. ...
• ALWAYS keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot. ...
• ALWAYS keep the gun unloaded until ready to use.

Just like we need to prepare children how to protect themselves if they are going to be having sex at an early age, we ought to do the same if we are raising them in a gun culture.