Point A Gun At the Police ....

And you will get shot. You might even die. That's what happened to a 15-year-old boy in Florida. He brought a weapon to school and in a standoff pointed it at the officer from the SWAT team, a 20-year veteran of the Seminole County Sheriff's Department and 16 years as a SWAT team member. Prior to that, officers requested the boy to put down the weapon. When he pointed it at officers, Lt. Mike Weippert shot once. Eventually the boy died, which may have been his intention: suicide by police.

Turns out the weapon pointed at the police was a pellet gun. And yes, the hand-wringing second guessers are already out. "Oh he was just a kid." "They shouldn't have shot, they should have known it was only a pellet gun." Yada yada yada. Same song, different verse. We've heard it all before every time the police shoot a suspect.

Bottom line is: when the police tell you to put down a weapon and instead you point it at the police, you can expect to be shot. It's a split-second decision; the police officer's life literally hangs in the balance. As a police officer who called into Charlie Sykes's show this morning said: "I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by six."

Too many Americans get their perceptions of police shootings from watching TV cop shows and from movies. It's easy in Hollywood to have the good guy shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hand, sort of "winging" him, but in real life it doesn't work that way. These are the people who don't understand why this kid and other like him wind up dead.