And yet you can bring a banana on a plane. What if I held a banana against the flight attendants back? Everything can be dangerous. Pretty soon they'll outlaw fingers. I might pretend my hand is a gun and take over the drink cart.
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Man Could Face Charges for Carrying iPhone Gun Case in London Airport
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You have the right to remain cholesterol free!! Put down that .....hmmmmm ehmmmm cholesterol firing device!
Anyone who denies that people, especially Americans, fetishize guns is just a damn liar.
Err, well people will see its a banana?
Hardly comparable to something that very convincingly looks like a handgun in somebody's pocket.
I think people here are getting a little lost as to what the implications of this story are all about. It's not about a phone case being physically dangerous or being used to hurt somebody. It's about the reaction it caused and potentially put the owners own life in danger. Only an idiot turns up at an airport with a gun handle in his pocket. Handguns are banned in the UK and with recent airport attacks in Europe it was a very foolish thing to do. I think we can all agree there.
The conclusion: the real threat is not the gun-shaped phone cases or the hair dryer, but the overreacting polices. In another words, the fault is not at the guy who carry these stuff, but the person in charge of the psychological training of the polices.
Overreacting police, are you serious?
A country where handguns are banned and somebody walks into an airport with an imitation and you think the police are at fault rather than the idiot carrying it?
I'd rather they overreact and stop a potentially deadly situation than assume and be ignorant.
LOL. Anybody remember "The Return of the Pink Panther" where Chief Inspector Dreyfus does something like this? He's got a gun, and a cigarette lighter shaped like a gun. Naturally he gets them confused while trying to light up a cancer stick and shoots his nose off.
I did not know cops anywhere had moved to shoot on sight? What's the split second decisions? Do I ask them about the gun or shoot them? If you live in a country where shoot them even occurs to the cops in a non violent typical environment you need to move because your cops and society have devolved to insanity. Even if it was a REAL gun their is no split decision to be made. My friends in the FBI (shame be upon them all) don't get shot when they carry because a cop needs to make a "split second decision". The cops just ask them if they notice it, or they explain it.
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The case is a bad idea in an airport. You cannot walk around an airport talking about plane crashes. You should not go to schools with bomb shaped clocks. Common sense. But outside of airports this is a harmless case of no danger to anyone and no threat except for people with irrational fears.
Well in an ideal world the police do follow that instruction in the UK. If we ignore the countless stories of US police shooting people dead before asking questions you might want to remind yourself of Jean Charles de Menezes, a man who was shot dead on the Tube. It happens sadly, not often but it's not worth putting yourself at risk.
It's also illegal to carry an offensive weapon like a knife or gun in public in the UK and that extends to imitation firearms.
If you bring something that looks like a gun into a place that bans guns you are going to have your visit disrupted. Doesn't mean you broke a law, it just means you need to expect to receive additional attention. What we, as people who don't carry guns or gun related items must do is get over this idea that airports need more protection than other public places. Airports are not special.
I'm all for creative expression and such. But to have a phone case like this is just stupid. Especially in today's volatile environment.
Not sure if being that stupid _is_ indeed illegal, but it should be. And meeting an armed response unit is not my idea of fun.
This guy wins the thread.
[doublepost=1467917906][/doublepost]Did anyone look at the tags on this article? Looks like some Trump guy went ham.
And then they will claim that the guards don't have a sense of humour. Of course they have a sense of humour. Whatever they do with that idiot, they will find very funny and laugh about it for the rest of the week.
Problem is when the police see something that looks that much like a gun, chances are it's a gun and not some idiot carrying a gun-shaped iPhone case in the <UK slang> bloody </UK slang> airport. Now their lives and the passengers' lives are on the line. And that guy could easily, you know, just NOT have a case that's obviously meant to fool authorities into thinking he has a gun. I don't know about fining the guy, but they had good reason to keep him off the flight.
The Pop Tart is clearly a Pop Tart.
Good to know. I guess all these pictures of police officers at London's airport are all photoshopped then:
https://www.google.com/search?q=london+airport+police+armed&tbm=isch
Seems someone must really like photoshopping submachine guns into the hands of London police officersat the airport. Really good work too, they look so real.
Isn't everything
. I kid, I kid. I chalk this up to this person being an idiot.[doublepost=1467919181][/doublepost]
Every country has its faults
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They kind of already have. Due to the 0 tolerance policy my nephew was suspended from school when he did something nice for someone, the person told him thank you, and my nephew proceeded to do the dual gun tsk tsk your welcome thing.
Congratulations on going to absurd lengths to try to paint this as anything other than an insanely stupid move by this idiot with the gun-shaped phone case. It makes you look like you'll say anything to support your side.
He is endangering other people's lives by carrying this novelty item into an airport. Law enforcement doesn't take too kindly to guns in airports, and they rightly feel the need to react very quickly. This guy has significantly raised the chances of some innocent bystander getting shot in an attempt to subdue him. This is in the same vein as yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater and then trying to claim that "well, there was no fire, I was just kidding, so it's okay." There is a world of difference between an L-shaped hair dryer and something purpose built to look as much like a real gun as possible (I'm guessing it was probably originally molded off a real live firearm).
Quite a few of our police forces carry guns, especially at airports. London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham etc all have a certain amount of armed police on the beat.
Yeah, sure, it's the police's fault. What would you suggest, wait until someone gets gunned down by a bad guy before deciding that "yes, maybe that is a real gun that I spotted"? Are you volunteering to be that sacrificial person who gets shot, just so the police can be really sure? Police are humans too. No amount of training will cause you to get that split second decision right in every possible circumstance. It can only make you somewhat better prepared. But since you're volunteering to be the "canary in the coal mine" for police shootings, who the bad guys can shoot so the police can be 100% sure that those are bad guys before reacting, well, you can die knowing you've made the world a safer place for idiots who want to carry fake guns in airports.
It is not the plastic cover is the problem. It is the way the gun phone cover design and how it would fit into pocket, a black gun like handle will stick out just like a real gun in the pocket.
When you walk around in airport, any airport in any country, and black gun handle hang out of front/back pocket, I am surprised airport police does not draw their gun and point at you.
A professional law enforcement will put gun in gun holster, not with handle hang out of pocket.
Added: If anyone try to put a hair dryer in the front/back pocket, to imitate a gun like handle, you also deserved to be pickup by law enforcement by pure stupidity.
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Huh. This will come as a considerable surprise to the person whose comment I was replying to, who said, flat out, "In UK they don't carry guns."
You really have to be a special kind of stupid to bring that thing to an airport..