Report Stephen Koff asks a question that—to him—has a self-evident answer.

What if Tamir Rice’s toy gun had been painted bright pink or a chartreuse shade of green?

To Koff and dim-witted lawmakers from Ohio to Capitol Hill, requiring toy firearms or air rifles to be brightly colored is the solution to the small but tragic number of police shootings every year of people holding toy guns or air rifles.

But there’s a multi-part failure to their “solution” of requiring toy guns to be colored differently than real firearms, which will lead to such a proposed law saving so much as a single life.

There is no standardized “real firearm” color

We can start with the the fact that real firearms come from the factory in any number of colors and color schemes.

Only those who are completely unaware of gun culture—which, to be fair, includes most lawmakers and journalists—think that firearms only come in black, gray, nickel and stainless. Most companies these days offer at least matte earth-tones in their firearm color offerings, and many provide the option of pink, camouflage, or even pink camouflage.

The aftermarket sale of everything from simple spray paints to high-end custom firearm coatings ensure that anyone with a firearm can color it any way they want.

Here is a small sampling of real, brightly-colored firearms from Cerakote’s image gallery. There are many, many more shown on that site alone.

There is no way to keep people from recoloring guns… whether they are real or toys

Are these legislators going to require universal background checks for spray paint?

If they aren’t, all it will take to turn a brightly colored toy gun a more traditional color is a can of spray paint that you can pick up almost anywhere for less than $4.

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…But color isn’t the real issue anyway

Rest assured, people will spend a great deal of money to colorize their real guns to be unique expressions of their personalities, and criminals around the nation have attempted to give themselves an edge by either camouflaging real guns to look like toys, or modifying toy guns and air guns to look real, depending on how they intend to use them.

When you look at the individual cases of people being shot while in the possession of a toy firearm, they seem to fall into three broad categories.

• Criminals attempting to use fake guns to commit crimes who run up against an armed citizen or police officer.
• Non-criminals who run up against a police officer and are fired upon before they can drop the toy weapon.
• Intentional “suicide-by-cop”scenarios where desperate people attempt to convince police that they have a real weapon.

Very few of us have much sympathy for those criminals who have earned a bullet by pulling a fake gun in an armed robbery, only to find out that a victim, passerby, or officer responded to a perceived deadly-force threat with a real weapon. You pulled a fake gun on someone who had a real one? Well, it sucks to be you.

Most of us have sympathy for those so desperate (and selfish) to end their lives that they fake having a deadly force option in order to have an officer of the law goaded into killing them. Frankly, we have far more sympathy for the officers placed into these no-win situations, where they must carry the weight of shooting someone who faked being a real threat.

The most troubling fake gun contact are those instances where a situationally-unaware and presumably innocent person—such as Andy Lopez, John Crawford, or Tamir Rice—runs up against a law enforcement officer who issues commands, but then fires upon these innocent people before they have a chance to process the commands in their minds and then react appropriately.

The color of the gun isn’t likely to make any difference at all in these scenarios, because officers are taught to assume that all guns are real.

In the cases of Lopez and Rice, officers drove right up on top of boys with airsoft guns, and shot them from close range when the boys did not process and drop the weapons in what the officers felt was a timely manner. In both instances, this was inside of two seconds, before their still-developing juvenile minds could process commands, much less respond to them.

In the case of John Crawford, Beavercreek officers “pied the corner” and killed Crawford almost on sight. They claim that they shouted for him to drop the BB gun in his hands, but he never gave any indication that he heard the command, and was on the ground, dying, within three seconds.

So what is the solution?

I’m sorry, but I don’t have a one-size-fits all” answer for you.

It’s easy to say “well, the cops should be trained to give them more time to respond to commands,” and in the cases of Lopez, Crawford, and Rice, even an extra half-second’s hesitation might have been the difference between life and death.

But it is equally true that if officer’s gave that extra half-second to a hardened criminal with a real gun, it could spell death for the officer.

There are no easy answers here… and yet these lawmakers and journalists seem to think that the easy answer of passing yet another pointless feel-good law that will have no impact on how officers must respond will make a difference.

I read long ago the saying, “that which governs best, governs least.”

It’s too bad that today’s legislators are too self-important and myopic in their views to be able to receive that bit of wisdom.