This is Part 3 of a series about gun violence in Bloomington-Normal. You can also read Part 1 (about trends police are seeing) and Part 2 (about how to interrupt juvenile gun crime).
Before his fatal confrontation with police, 15-year-old Cole Turner of Normal had something to show off to his friends: His new gun.
It wasn’t a real gun, but it sure looked like it. The Sig Sauer P365 BB gun is nearly identical to its bullet-firing twin. Authorities say his friends saw it up-close and thought it was real.
So did police. Two days after Turner bought the gun, Bloomington Police say he pointed it at officers who cornered him in an apartment parking lot. They shot and killed him. Prosecutors who reviewed the case say they were legally justified, in part, because they couldn’t tell the gun was fake.
“There are no markings on this weapon which identifies the gun as a replica of a real weapon. Nor identifies it as a non-lethal handgun,” Police Chief Jamal Simington said about the shooting. “In this incident, four of our community members observed [Turner] with a gun. All four feared for their safety, as did the involved officers.”
Turner was not the only young person in Bloomington-Normal with an imitation gun. Local police say they’re encountering them more frequently, often among young people for whom guns are a status symbol. Like all commodities, fakes can be an easy way to get what you want.
And unlike real guns, imitation guns – which can threaten others and get you killed – are barely regulated. And even those regulations have loopholes.
“This is not an area where I’ve seen a lot of attention focused on,” said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel and vice president at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “There is more attention, from all sides of the political issue, and much more concern about regulating actual firearms than there is about toy or imitation firearms.”
One group that is paying attention is Bloomington-Normal police.
“It is frequent. There are many cases a year where a juvenile will have a realistic gun sitting on the back seat or in their backpack, something of that nature,” said Officer Bryce Janssen, a Bloomington Police spokesperson.
It happens enough that Normal Police collect and share intelligence about people known to have a realistic-looking fake gun, said Officer Brad Park, an NPD spokesperson.
“Because the officers need to know [that] we know that this person was located as having an airsoft gun that looked like a realistic firearm. Because we know they’re going to use that gun to try and make it look like they had a real firearm,” Park said.
McLean County State’s Attorney Erika Reynolds said her office hasn’t seen a lot of cases involving imitation guns, but the ones they have seen “are very serious.”
“There have been instances where a fake gun is actively used to threaten police officers and others, and no one but the person possessing the fake gun is aware,” she said. “When those incidents occur, the individuals are arrested and then often charged with a felony offense of aggravated assault. Those are most commonly seen in situations where individuals with mental health issues are using the fake gun to threaten others.”
Why do they exist?
Toy guns have long been part of American culture. Today’s imitation guns are far more sophisticated.
Authorities say Turner bought his Sig Sauer P365 BB gun two days before his fatal shooting Feb. 25. It’s unclear where he bought it; State Police, which investigated his shooting, have not yet responded to WGLT’s records request for documents related to the case.
Turner’s BB gun didn’t even work, authorities said, suggesting it wasn’t bought new.
Had he wanted, Turner could have bought a new one on Sig Sauer’s website for $130, with free shipping. He would’ve had to check a single box to certify he was at least 21 – a flimsy barrier that many children can bypass. Sig Sauer markets the BB gun as a “low-cost alternative” to its popular bullet-firing sibling, complete with a blowback slide that mimics the real thing. Sig Sauer did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Ostensibly, a BB gun like this is meant for training and target practice.
“People want them, all over the world. They want those things,” said Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association [ISRA]. “You have to look at the other side of it, the people who are doing the right thing. We always want to take action against people who do the wrong thing, but then we punish the people who do the right things.”
There are federal regulations that apply to certain lookalikes, like toy guns and water guns, requiring bright markings (often orange) or another obvious indicator that it’s fake. That requirement does not apply to traditional BB, paintball, or pellet-firing air guns.
States vary in how they regulate them. Illinois merely prohibits sales to those under 13.
“If you're selling a product that any observer is going to think is a firearm, but is not, it’d be appropriate to require that those have bright colors in color, so that they wouldn't be mistaken for a weapon,” said Skaggs, with the Giffords Law Center.
Pearson, with the ISRA, said that wouldn’t work.
“Well, we tried that, all they do is paint it black. They buy a can of black spray paint and they sprayed the thing. They used to have an orange tip on them, right? And so what happened? They either took the orange tip off or they spray-painted it black,” he said.
Pearson said parents should control juvenile access to imitation guns like this.
“You can’t regulate something that’s ubiquitous particularly well. You have to teach the people who potentially handle these things what the right and wrong way to do it is,” he said.
Pearson said you “can’t make a law because of one or two incidents.”
But it’s not one or two incidents. Nationally, there were 210 people killed and another 154 injured in police shootings involving a BB or replica gun between 2015 and 2020, according to the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins. That’s about 3.4% of people injured in police shootings during that five-year period.
“One serious concern that these kind of lookalike firearms have is that they can be mistaken for a real gun, whether by law enforcement or by another individual. If you see someone carrying what you think is a gun, you may perceive a threat that's not present,” Skaggs said.
