You can't assume that in the land of the Second Amendment though. I read a story just a few months ago about a child in Kentucky who accidentally killed his sister with an actual "kid-sized gun" or something like that.
A child on a U.S. street with an actual handgun wouldn't surprise me one bit.
That doesn't mean that the cop had to shoot the child though but I don't know the details to the case you're referring to enough to comment one way or the other.
Sadly true. Not only the Kentucky case, but in New Jersey a few months ago a 4 year old playing outside went into the house, picked up a gun, and shot & killed a 6 year old. The father of the 4yo has been charged over it since.
Toy guns in the US are now required to have bright orange flashing on them to ID them as toys. Of course a criminal could put bright orange paint on a real gun to make it look like a toy, and some do (http://publicintelligence.net/baltimore-police-department-gu...) but since most criminals want to intimidate people with their guns it doesn't happen that often. It's more common, I suspect, for people to modify toy guns to make them look more real. Some people do so to threaten people, sometimes there's a case of 'suicide by cop' where the person calls the police or brandishes the painted-to-look-real toy weapon in public and then points it at police when they show up to investigate, who unsurprisingly tend to shoot rather than waiting to see if they'll get shot.
"A child on a U.S. street with an actual handgun wouldn't surprise me one bit."
It probably should, since that is an exceedingly rare phenomenon. Furthermore, painting such a broad stroke of a nation with ~314 million people and thousands of political jurisdictions, with their own gun laws, is absurd.
It's also rare when someone wins the lottery, but it doesn't surprise me when it happens. It'd be unusual IMO to have seen the rare event, but not surprising that it happened.
A child on a U.S. street with an actual handgun wouldn't surprise me one bit.
That doesn't mean that the cop had to shoot the child though but I don't know the details to the case you're referring to enough to comment one way or the other.