Watch: US police open fire as seven-year-old refuses to drop gun
Police officers in New Mexico opened fire after two children refused to drop a loaded handgun.
Footage shows the two boys, dressed in Minecraft and Star Wars pyjamas, passing the pistol to each other and hiding it behind their backs.
In the footage, the pair wave around the weapon, and one boy pulls the trigger, although the gun does not fire.
Officers eventually fired a non-lethal round at the wall of the home rather than directly at the boys in an attempt to make them stop.
'Put it down, babe,' one female officer told the two boys.
'You're not in trouble but you have to put it down and come and talk to us,' another officer added.
A male officer then advised his colleague to shoot for the wall, not at the children, to force them to put the weapon down.
'Try not to hit 'em,' the officer told his colleague, before another added: 'Drop it now or you're gonna get hit.'
An officer eventually rushed in to detain both boys as they clung on to the weapon.
'Had that gun gone off, our deputies could have taken deadly force. That would not have gone well with anybody in the nation,' John Allen, the Bernalillo County sheriff, told a news conference.
'This will shock the conscience of Bernalillo County,' he added.
The boys were not arrested but instead referred to a behavioural health unit, where an official intervention was staged.
Officers said that the family was well-known to police, who had visited the property at least 50 times before the incident, and that the boys have a history of trauma.
Mr Allen said that 'this was learned behaviour' rather than a misunderstanding.
Deanna Aragon, a spokesman for the police department, said that neither the parents nor the children had been charged with a crime. The gun was seized, she added.
The Bernalillo County sheriff's office said that it released the footage, filmed in February, to show how it used drone technology to 'monitor situations in real time, providing critical updates and enhancing situational awareness'.
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