Carrying A Gun-Shaped iPhone 'Makes It Much Less Likely You'll Catch Your Plane' (cnet.com)

HughPickens.com writes: A passenger at London Stansted Airport seemed to think it was a good idea to have a gun-shaped iPhone case in his back pocket as he prepared to board a plane... [T]he police speculated on Twitter that they could proceed with charges against him for either a public order offense or for possession of an imitation firearm in a public place tweeting with the hashtag #dontbedaft that "Bringing this to an airport makes it much less likely you'll catch your plane."

[In 2015] the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office in New Jersey offered this warning on Facebook to potential users: "Please folks -- this cell phone case is not a cool product or a good idea. A police officer's job is hard enough, without having to make a split second decision in the dark of night when someone decides without thinking to pull this out while stopped for a motor vehicle violation..." One Twitter user responded, "On what planet is this a smart thing to do?" But the New Jersey prosecutor has asked their followers on social media to share their own opinions.

Comments

He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[ihtoit]

That is all.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[seoras]

He was in London, not Texas.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[ihtoit]

there are armed police at all UK commercial airports now, have been since 9/11.

(source: asked an armed police officer at Nottingham East Midlands Airport last month as I was passing through).

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[ihtoit]

lol I have no idea on that, what I do know from training firearms authorised police officers in range marksmanship is that the "normal" armed response (airport cops aren't armed response, they're armed transport police) carry Glock 17s, Heckler & Koch MP5SF carbines, custom H&K G3 DSR (designated sniper rifles), Sig SG 516 AR-15 rifles, HK417 marksmen rifles, and Remington 870 shotguns.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[fustakrakich]

And obviously they are far better trained on when NOT to shoot! American cops are taught differently

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[haruchai]

I'm sure there are flaming assholes in every country, profession, demographic but UK cops, compared to America's Finest, have shown phenomal restraint under some dangerous situations.

For example, when 2 Nigerian terrorist knocked down offduty soldier Lee Rigby with a car then beheaded him with a cleaver, the unarmed cops didn't shit themselves but set up a cordon and guided passerbys away until the armed unit showed up and took both assailants alive, only shooting to wound, despite being rushed by both assailants with weapons in hand, performing 1st aid on one and getting them medical aid.

By contrast , Officer Brelo of the Cleveland PD fired 49 shots ( his fellow cops fired a total of 90 more ) into the car, windshield and bodies of 2 African-Americans. His final 15 bullets were discharged WHILE HE WAS STANDING ON THE HOOD - but he claimed to be afraid for his life???

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[jopsen]

there are armed police at all UK commercial airports now, have been since 9/11.

But officers in the UK are better trained and less trigger happy.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? You can't bring a gun or even an assault rifle to the airport it seems. It's almost like living in East Germany.
I had to listen to my 7 year old crying for an hour because they confiscated his H&K MP5. Ridiculous.
You people are a bunch of boot lickers.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[PopeRatzo]

Yeah but police who don't actually expect get shot by members of the public, during every shift they work.

Police don't expect to get shot by members of the public during every shift they work. Being a police officer isn't even in the top 10 deadliest jobs. Garbage collectors and truck drivers are much more likely to get killed on the job than police.

The 10 Deadliest Jobs: Deaths per 100,000

1. Logging workers: 128.8
2. Fishers and related fishing workers: 117
3. Aircraft pilot and flight engineers: 53.4
4. Roofers: 40.5
5. Structural iron and steel workers: 37
6. Refuse and recyclable material collectors: 27.1
7. Electrical power-line installers and repairers: 23
8. Drivers/sales workers and truck drivers: 22.1
9. Farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers: 21.3
10. Construction laborers: 17.4

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[ColdWetDog]

Question 2: How many here have ever been confused as to which state they're in? I drive all over the country, and I've never found myself thinking, "Am I in Texas or Oregon? I can't tell."

Come on. It's easy in the American NE. You can sneeze twice and go entirely through Rhode Island.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[Anonymous Coward]

lol I have no idea on that, what I do know from training firearms authorised police officers in range marksmanship is that the "normal" armed response (airport cops aren't armed response, they're armed transport police) carry Glock 17s, Heckler & Koch MP5SF carbines, custom H&K G3 DSR (designated sniper rifles), Sig SG 516 AR-15 rifles, HK417 marksmen rifles, and Remington 870 shotguns.

They must be very muscular and strong to carry around all those guns!

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[wonkey_monkey]

Not that it wasn't a tragedy, but you had to go more than a decade back to find that example.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[haruchai]

"They hid! While Lee Rigby was having his head chopped off, they were staying on the other side of the crowd"
Bullshit.
Unarmed officers showed up 9 minutes after the emerg call at 14:20h by which point Rigby was already dead and been dragged into the road.
Armed unit took another 5 minutes to arrive.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[Guspaz]

Drive 350 miles between Montreal and Providence, and you'll pass through four states and one province. An extra 60 miles and you could add another two states to that. 7 states/provinces in 410 miles. Damn straight I've said aloud "What state are we in?" while driving in New England.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I don't know how many of those occupations involve getting shot at, stabbed or beaten as a matter of course, but at least none of them involves killing ten times as many other people every year. Apparently the public is still at a greater risk from the US police than the US police is from the US public.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[PopeRatzo]

They wouldn't even have BEEN at the scene in Baton Rouge if the guy in question hadn't been waving a gun around and threatening.

They took the guy's gun out of his pocket after they shot and killed him.

I don't know if you've seen the videos, but the tazers had done their job. The guy had one arm laying useless and the other in a "Please don't shoot me!" gesture. He was nowhere near pulling a gun.

As I said (and as you can learn from my citation), the police are taught to shoot and kill before they see a threat.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[PopeRatzo]

I call BS on professional airline pilot. Pilot in general, sure, due to general aviation. But no way on commercial aviation.

You can call BS all you want.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

http://time.com/4326676/danger...

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/12...

These are statistics from three different years. And being a police officer is still less dangerous than being a taxi driver or janitor.

If you don't like the statistics, you can call and complain to the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and CNBC.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[geoskd]

The difference is, the above comment which was being responded to, "Police don't expect to get shot by members of the public during every shift they work", is idiotic, unless the poster thinks the cops can single out *specific shifts* where they might get shot at, in which case they could simply call in sick for those shifts and cops would never get shot at all. TLDR, police work is deadly and cops risk death by gunshot at all times even if they're not on the SWAT team. One of the 5 sniper victims on Friday was a transit cop.

Cops in this country are increasingly at risk of being shot specifically *because* of the shoot first ask questions later mentality. When one side of a conflict is perceived as being trigger happy, the other side has to up their game in self defense. The only solution is to DE-escalate, and the criminals are not the ones who are supposed to be the professionals. If you want to reduce the number of police involved shootings, disarm the police completely, and make killing and unarmed officer an automatic capitol offense, with mandatory death penalty. Then the police will actually be safer since shooting a cop will effectively mean a death sentence for the shooter. How often do British police get shot? How often do they shoot anyone, innocent or otherwise? British cops are a hell of a lot safer than US cops specifically *because* they are not armed. There have been more than a dozen cops shot in the line of duty in the US just this year so far. Thats is about the same number of PCs in Britain that have ever been shot in the last century. The number of people who have been shot by British cops is zero because they don't have anything to shoot people with. Compare that to the US where cops have killed an average of 500 people per year. Its high time we disarmed the front line police in this country: For their protection and ours.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[sribe]

there are armed police at all UK commercial airports now, have been since 9/11.

There were armed police or army, carrying actual assault rifles, in Heathrow in 1986...

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[dbIII]

The amount of training they go through and how well co-ordinated the UK police system is would utterly astound officers of the tens of thousands of distinct police forces in the USA.
Police training not gun training I mean - it's very different, far more professional than in nearly every US police force giving them a lot of options other than drawing and shooting at a suspect.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[Dog-Cow]

If you're seeing "WELCOME TO MOTHERFUCKING NEW JERSEY, DOUCHEBAG" at every border, while visiting NY, VT, and Pennsylvania, you might be a little confused as to which state you're in. I know I would be.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[publiclurker]

no, he is using the word in the normal sense that people who are not interested in justifying murder use.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[colinwb]

You cite the example of the British police being (mostly) unarmed, and then suggest the USA police should be disarmed with a mandatory death penalty for killing a USA police officer: you might want to consider that here in the United Kingdom, not only are the police mostly unarmed, but also the death penalty was removed in Britain in 1965 (and in Northern Ireland in 1973), so it's not fear of being judicially killed that's keeping murders of police relatively low. (I'm assuming that the rate of police being killed is higher in the US than the UK - in the true Slashdot spirit, a ten second web search didn't find what I was looking for, so I'll go with what might be the case.)

A minor correction: it's not quite true that "the number of people who have been shot by British cops is zero because they don't have anything to shoot people with"; without searching, I can think of at least two men who have been shot and killed by British police recently: a completely innocent Brazilian whom the police thought might have been a terrorist, and Mark Duggan who had previous criminal convictions. That said, it's true that most UK police are not armed, which, as you say, means they don't have the opportunity to shoot people.

Assuming this Wikipedia list is materially correct, then since 1996 the UK police have killed 41 people, about 2 people per year; the USA population is very roughly five times that of the UK, so the rate for US police seems to be about 50 times the UK rate.

I started at 1996 because if the Wikipedia list is true then nobody was killed by the UK police between 1921 and 1978, which I find more than somewhat unlikely. And the figures do not include deaths in Northern Ireland caused by the British military. According to Wikipedia, between 1969 and 2007 the British military killed 306 people, about 51% being civilians and 41% being republican paralilitaries (presumably the remaining 8% were associated with unionist paramilitaries). In the same period 722 of the British military were killed by paramilitary attacks and 719 died from other causes.

Re:He is lucky he did not get shot on the spot

[ScentCone]

So, you're saying that The Police all kill people before they see any threats...

No, just the black ones.

Really. So in millions of police interactions with people every year, The Police kill all the black people they encounter without there being any threat. That explains why good old fashioned murder of black men by other black men is a vanishingly small occurrence by comparison. Woops! That's exactly backwards, isn't it. Yup.

The point is, there is no such thing as "The Police Killing The Black People" - it's a fantasy. There is such a thing as a police officer shooting someone. Police use lethal force more often on white people than they do black people, of course, not to take any of the fun out of the rant for you. Police also work in some very high crime areas that happen to have much larger black populations, and that much higher rate of interacting with black people while also dealing with a more dangerous, higher-crime area of course changes how often force intersects with a given skin color.

We can talk all day long about how places where one cop or two respond to something should probably be four cops or six, so that a given officer isn't wound up nearly so tight, or as likely to fear for his life like that way-out-of-his-league cop in MN that was a jumpy nervous wreck and shot that driver the other day because he misinterpreted the guy's going for his ID. You solve those nerves with more and better backup, and if that doesn't work, you get rid of an incurably nervous cop, and prosecute the ones who should have known/done batter. But you don't say "The Police Kill Black People" like it's some sort of across the board feature of being a cop, or happens everyday. Idiots repeating claims like that are part of the problem, not the solution. It's no different than people who say "computer hackers are pedophiles."

Whoah

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I'm a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment but even I think this is foolhardy at best and insanely stupid at worst.

And trying to board a plane with it these days seems like a terrifically stupid thing to do, despite the fact that it's not actually a firearm.

Re:Whoah

[Jhon]

It's part of an ans amble. There's a matching vest with wires and color coordinated blocks of clay and smoking shoes.

Re:Whoah

[djinn6]

Even boarding a plane at all seems pretty stupid nowadays... they've got all these moron types in charge of security theater.

What the FUCK?

[Opportunist]

Don't get me wrong. I'm the first to defend anyone from overreaching, overzealous and trigger-happy "must-fight-terrrrrrism" idiots shivering in their boots because they assume that everyone and their dog wants to blow them to kingdom come. But how STUPID do you have to be to bring something shaped like a GUN to an airport?

Re:What the FUCK?

[SeaFox]

...how STUPID do you have to be to bring something shaped like a GUN to an airport?

Looking at the photos of the entire case, it looks like it would be rather awkward to make phone calls with the phone while it was still in the case. It seems like an item whose only use would be a stupid prank like this.

Re:What the FUCK?

[thegarbz]

It seems silly to file charges.

Does it? We laugh it off in your scenario as giving someone an award for being a jackass. Next time it turns into wide spread panic along with shots fired and some one dies. The chargers here are public order offences, a fine not exceeding 1000GBP. Seems perfectly reasonable for insane stupidity which could cause disruption and panic in an international airport.

Re:Only one good reason to do this ...

[PopeRatzo]

In the USA, bringing a gun-shaped iPhone into an airport is almost certainly legal under free speech laws, especially if it doesn't look so much like a gun that it would cause reasonable people to panic

Hold on a sec. We recently had an Italian mathematician who had his flight grounded and was taken off and questioned, because some stupid American lady thought the math symbols on his notepad were "terrorist code". I'll bet this woman would consider herself a reasonable person.

I don't think you necessarily want "would cause a reasonable person to panic" to be the legal standard, because you might have trouble finding any.

Re:Police are not executioners.

[PopeRatzo]

You do the exact same thing you SHOULD do if you suspect someone has a gun, tell them to freeze and then to slowly raise their arms above their head.

Then if they're black you fire a few warning shots into their chest.

Unfortunately, that's what US police are being taught.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015...

and another thing

[sacrilicious]

"Please folks -- this cell phone case is not a cool product or a good idea. A police officer's job is hard enough, without having to make a split second decision in the dark of night when someone decides without thinking to pull this out while stopped for a motor vehicle violation..."

And further: do not make it so that to unlock the phone, you have to activate its voice recognition and then scream into it, "I'm gonna GIT you mothahfuckah!"

Just sayin'.

Re:Only one good reason to do this ...

[PopeRatzo]

The mathematician was taken off the plane and questioned. The flight took off two hours late because of a crazy Trump supporter, acting the fool.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Re:why the fuck..

[lucm]

That's one more thing you got wrong.

What they did was not hitting themselves on the head, what they did was standing up and rejecting once again the idea of a unified Europe under German control. This is called the right to self determination, but of course you're against it, just like you're against letting a politician speak his mind unless you share his opinion.

The only thing...

[dohzer]

The only thing that stops a bad guy with an iPhone is a good guy with an iPhone.

Re:why the fuck..

[colinwb]

"what they did was standing up and rejecting once again the idea of a unified Europe under German control" - No, that's what about 52% of the people who voted in the recent referendum did. The other 48% (including me) voted to remain in the EU.

And while there may have been some voting for exit because of perceived German dominance, I suspect most were equal opportunity disliking of control by foreigners. (A position with which, to repeat myself, I disagree.)

For what it's worth, given a choice between being led by, say, Donald Trump and Angela Merkel, I'll happily follow Merkel. Actually, given a choice between Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom - the two remaining contenders for leadership of the Conservative Party - I'll go with Angela Merkel. There's something deeply ironic about the next UK prime minister being chosen by about 150,000 people who were largely in favour of exit from the European Union to regain control from an "anti-democratic" institution, with the other 99.6% of the electorate (including me) having no say whatsoever in this.