Law requires toy guns to have bright orange tips on the barrel so they can be easily identified as toys.
Why wouldn’t the bad guys put orange tips on the real thing to either prevent cops from shooting, or at least get a delay caused by the confusion? I haven’t heard of a single case of this.
Probably more than 90% of the time the bad guys use guns to threaten people rather than shoot at them. The bad guy wants the victim to take the threat seriously.
Moderator Action
I doubt that you’ll be able to find anything that you can factually cite on this. Let’s move this thread to IMHO so that people can speculate and give their opinions.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
And with that, when I was young the first thing I’d do with a cap gun is drill the orange tip off of it. But that was so we could inhale the smoke. I was blowing smoke rings years before I smoked my first cigarette.
I think if a bad guy put an orange tip on a real gun (or painted it orange to look like a fake rubber practice gun), the cops would see it and rush him…then what. Most bad guys don’t rob a store with the plan of shooting a cop and as PastTense said, the whole point is to be scary. With a “fake gun” they’d risk not being taken seriously and having to escalate the situation.
Also, what does the cop do when he sees an orange tipped gun pointed at him? Does he shoot back or just go in and tackle the guy? If it’s a real gun (as in the OP) he’ll be a local hero, if he’s wrong and it’s a cap gun he’ll be crucified on national news and facebook. I can’t see any good reason for the bad guy to do that.
FTR, when my store was held up, the robber had the gun in a paper bag. I later told the cop I was armed and hiding out in my office, but asked what would have happened if I had shot a guy with his hand in a bag. He said I would have been in the clear. I asked what would have happened if it turned out that there was nothing in there, he said I still would have been in the clear since he was implying that he had one and threatening the cashier and the other employees. Even though no one ever saw the gun, it was still written up as an armed robbery.
I think that would carry over to this situation. Ignoring how social media would react to it, if someone robs a store with a gun that has an orange tip, he would probably still be treated as if it’s a real gun. If he raised the gun and pointed it and someone, he’d probably get himself killed.
If it turned out to be a cap gun, I’m of the mind that ‘well, if you didn’t rob a store, you’d still be alive’.
There are lots of brightly colored handguns and even some rifles on the market. Pink and purple/violet are popular colors. One product used to refinish firearms is even sold in colors based on some statements that a former NYC mayor made a few years back. Staten Island Orange, Manhattan Red, and Queens Green for example.
Most criminals are very stupid. They don’t have the foresight to do such things.
Same thing when four muggers surrounded me. The police record used the phrase “Simulated weapons within their clothing.” They might have just had their hands in their pockets, or they might have had guns, but the act of simulating guns turns it into the equivalent of an armed robbery. They can’t claim, later, “We didn’t have guns,” and expect a lighter sentence.
I didn’t finish reading what you wrote before I hit the quote button but you said exactly what I was thinking. I’m working on the assumption that the guy that held up my store had his gun in a bag so that if he got caught no one, no employee, no camera, no customer etc, could say that they saw a gun. But I’m guessing it doesn’t matter. It’s like selling someone cocaine, getting caught and then telling the cops ‘it was just baking soda’, and it was. Turns out selling fake drugs will get you in trouble too.
If the people that robbed my store someday got caught for it, they’d go down for armed robbery. Assuming it still works that way, I assume it’s one of those things that people just think is true because they heard it somewhere like "always ask if they’re a cop before you buy weed from them, they have to tell you or it’s entrapment’, yeah, no it’s not and the cop can say no.
I don’t think the police will hesitate to shoot when an adult is holding something that looks like a gun even if it has an orange cap on it.
Something has gone wrong with your criminal activity if you are at a point where having an orange tip on your gun could make a difference.
Most criminals never plan to have any police involvement so it doesn’t make sense to plan for it. An adult with an orange tipped gun is going to draw suspicion as well. I doubt the cops are going to give an adult with a toy looking gun the benifit of doubt.
I suppose a very young criminal mastermind that intends to get into a shootout with the cops might benifit from making his gun look like a toy. Outside of that I can’t think of many hypotheticals that someone benifits from having a toy looking real gun.
I suspect that this is indeed true.
I would only add the word “very” between “gone” and “wrong”