Colorado Springs, CO–In a world gone mad, violent criminals get released onto the streets while ten-year-old boys get arrested for pretending to shoot at passing cars.
Parents of two boys in Fort Carson, Colorado spoke out this week about what their sons went through in July of 2019.
Gavin Carpenter, 10, and his friend were playing an imaginary version of the video game Fortnight. They weren’t at school–where pretending to have a gun would have been a bad idea. No, they were in Gavin’s front yard near N. Powers Blvd and Constitution Ave.
In the boys’ imaginary game, they were shooting enemy tanks. Those tanks? Passing cars. The two boys had pointed their Nerf guns at passing cars and *imagined* shooting them.
When asked about the “weapons” in question, Gavin explained what they were using: “The toy bow was an orange Nerf bow. It didn’t work. Nothing could shoot out of it. Nothing would come out of it. The weapon, well toy I had, had an orange tip. It was also broken and couldn’t shoot anything out of it.”
Just to be clear, the boys weren’t even shooting Nerf darts at cars. They were *pointing* them at cars.
But a driver in one of the cars felt threatened by the boys. When he saw the boys and their toy guns, he immediately pulled over. “He slammed his breaks and started reversing as fast as he could,” Gavin said. “He came up and started getting very heated and was very mad. I was at the time, very scared.”
The two boys ran away into a nearby yard, but the man was so irate that he called the police.
Common Sense…Where Did You Go?
This whole story is bizarre, but it’s about to get worse. El Paso county sheriff’s deputies took the call and arrived at the Carpenter’s home.
They asked some questions, and then arrested both boys. Gavin explained, “They came back over, told me my rights, and told me what was going to happen. They put handcuffs on me, and I got into the car.”
The charge? Felony Menacing, a Class 5 felony.
Two ten-year-old boys charged with felonies for pointing inoperable Nerf guns at passing cars.
The boys were taken to the county sheriff’s office where they were fingerprinted and had their mugshots taken. Gavin’s parents followed the police car in their own, but reported that Gavin wasn’t released until after 10:30 pm.
They assumed that the charges would be dropped once the judge or whoever was in charge of this sort of thing heard the details. But when they arrived at their court date, they heard otherwise. Gavin’s father, Chris said, “It was just a hard no, that the District Attorney wasn’t going to throw this out. That is when we moved into the diversion program.”
A diversion program in Colorado is basically a way of ‘working’ the charge off your record. It’s similar to taking a driver’s safety course to keep a speeding ticket from hitting your insurance. The diversion program had Gavin do community service, submit a written essay on how he’ll never do this again, and other tasks before the expunge could happen.
216 days after he was charged with a class 5 felony, it was finally expunged from his record after he met the terms of his diversion.
Our Grandparents Wouldn’t Recognize This America!
This is an anti-gun mentality that has just gotten so far out of control that it’s laughable.
What kind of an adult man is so threatened by children pointing Nerf guns at this car that he pulls over at all? Much less loses his temper enough to call the cops? And THEN decides to go ahead and press charges?
Somebody who has bought everything the media is selling about how dangerous guns are. A full-grown man should know better! But the man was completely out of touch with reality thanks to #FakeNews filling his head with lies. The left has inflated the ‘threat of gun violence’ to near hysteria, while still ignoring things like smoking, alcohol, and obesity that kill multiple hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.