While, from the little I know, it is another tragic case similar to the 12 year old, from what I have been told by moondog, who was attempting to shore up the racist cop narrative, the officers might even be less culpable. According to moondog, Crawford, the victim, was on the phone with someone when he was shot, and according to the other part, his last words were "It's not real." In other words, it seems very likely that he argued with the cops who were telling him to drop the gun. What's more, while that model was indeed sold in the store, he was carrying it out of the packaging. If it was one of those guns that resemble the real thing as closely as possible, the question of how you can be expected to tell at a distance that it was the same make and model sold in the store is a good one. Who is going to get close enough to a man wandering through Walmart with a gun, to be sure it is plastic or a pellet-shooting replica, rather than the real thing? And if indeed his last words were "It's not real" it seems very likely that rather than dropping the gun, he innocently brandished it to show the cops, who had no way of knowing whether he was innocent, or trying to mislead them to buy time to raise his gun and shoot them.