There may be time left to avert a potential tragedy in our area. It will require people to think sanely and not brandish BB guns or their like - otherwise, someone could end up dead.

When anyone, young or of any age, packs and displays something that looks - even at a glance - like a cartridge firearm, law enforcement officers have to assume the worst, that the person is armed and dangerous.

That it only launches a pellet makes not the least bit of difference. If it has any resemblance to a Glock, a SIG-Sauer or the like, a cop has an instant decision to make about the person holding it.

One of the legitimate options is deadly force.

Imagine being a police officer who takes down a teenage boy who seemed to be drawing down on him - then finds that what has fallen from the dead kid's hand is a CO2 pistol. The remorse the officer could experience doesn't bear thinking about.

It is not alarmism to raise this concern. A week ago, Bismarck police had to deal with reports of teenagers driving around in a car, waving handguns. Officers made a bust with guns drawn. The kids had two BB guns.

According to the New York City Council Investigation Division, in "January 2003, a 17-year-old in Manhattan put a BB gun to the head of an undercover detective dressed as a deliveryman. Police fatally shot him. In August 2003, a Brooklyn man holding a toy gun was shot and killed by police."

Don't bother saying, "What do you expect from New York?" It could as easily have been a city in North Dakota.

There have been efforts to preclude some aspects of this ugly scenario. In 1988, Congress passed legislation called the Federal Toy Gun Law. It requires toy guns that in any way resemble the real thing to have a blaze orange plug in the barrel or some kind of marking approved by the secretary of Commerce.

A New York state law makes sense, that toy guns not be allowed to have a black, blue, silver or aluminum finish but show a nonremovable one-inch orange stripe around the barrel. Even so, that didn't deter a couple of teenagers from that state from wrapping black tape around toy guns for use in a robbery. The attempt failed. Two officers shot and killed the boys.

That doesn't begin to deal with the problem of pellet guns. It's sobering to go onto the Web sites of some manufacturers of the devices and read the boasts of how much they resemble the real deal - sidearms made by the same weapons factories bearing some famous names.

It's probably spitting in the wind to suggest a ban on the manufacture or sale of facsimile handguns. Maybe the best we can do is to beg, plead, cajole or whatever it takes to make people of any age treat the look-alikes as if they were deadly weapons. If any situation is such that it wouldn't make a rational person wield a .40-cal semiautomatic pistol, holding a pellet pistol instead is not a joke.

Rather than hearing the age-old admonition from a stern parent to a kid holding a brand new BB gun, "You be careful with that thing. It could put someone's eye out" - it could as well be said, "Used wrongly, that thing could get you killed."