Ben Shapiro: “If you drop the gun right before the cop shoots you, it is very difficult to call that unarmed”
13-year-old Adam Toledo was unarmed when he was fatally shot by a Chicago police officer
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From the April 16, 2021, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): This kid is running from the cops. The cop is chasing the kid and you can see the body cam footage. Now the way this was originally reported was unarmed Black kid shot. That is not true. OK? It is not true. The kid is running. Finally the kid stops and the police officer says, “Turn around and drop the gun." The kid has his hand behind him. OK, it is very difficult from the body cam footage to see where he drops the gun, so you assume that the officer has the same vantage point. So the kid sort of has the gun on his right hip. He reaches behind him, he drops the gun and raises his hands in one motion. He drops the gun directly behind him and raises his hands in one motion. But because his hand is behind him when he drops the gun and when he starts to raise his hands, by the time his hand begins to raise the shot has been fired. The shot gets fired before his hand is all the way to the top of his head because it's literally a bang, bang scenario.
OK, now, cops are not robots. The kid did have a gun. If you drop the gun right before the cop shoots you, it is very difficult to call that unarmed. It is very reminiscent of that case in Baltimore recently in which the suspect threw away the gun and in the same motion -- as he's running -- he throws away the gun and gets shot at exactly the same time. It looks very much like this.
So, the still that has gone out from the media is the still of the kid raising his hands as he's being shot. But they don't go to literally a split second beforehand, right? If you rewound this a split second, what you will see is the kid's hand behind his hip -- right there, it's behind his hip and you will see that he has a gun in his hand behind him. Right? So how is a cop supposed to deal with that? When the hand is obscured -- he's not facing him -- when the hand is obscured behind his hip and he raises his hand, you don't know whether the gun is coming up with him in his hand. There's a reason why even CNN legal analysts were like, “This is a good shoot." What are you supposed to do if you're a cop? Are we supposed to tell cops that they're just supposed to take the shot? Like, are they just supposed to receive the shot? What exactly are they supposed to do right here? So the media have decided that this is yet another murder of a young person in Chicago, based on race, of course -- OK, that is an absurd contention.