I Was Pulled Over By Cops for carrying an UMBRELLA!

[FoolKiller]

Well... it could be worse. Look at the Wikileaks video that shows a guy carrying a camera on a tripod and a US military helicopter gunned him and his friends down. And then when a van came to help the wounded they shot up the van too. And it had kids inside. So being asked about something which could be misinterpreted as a weapon is not that bad.

 

[Artina89]

How can someone look at an umbrella and think "assault rifle"? that's what I want to know.

 

[Oktanas]

First of all I want you to congratulate on cool umbrella.
Second thing move out of that city!!!

 

[PureChaos]

wow, police fail. looks SO much like an assault rifle

It wasn't the police's fault. SOMEONE reported him to have been carrying an assault rifle.

As for OT: I still want a secret service umbrella - I seen saw it on TV, there's one specially made out of some kind of titanium frame, with stab-proof fabric. They had a guy put the umbrella between two tables, and he was JUMPING up and down on the umbrella, and all it did was bend a bit under his weight... Oh and the thing is entirely windproof - like the brolly I have; the weathershield is layered into two sections that allows wind to pass through it so you don't get retarded inside-out umbrella when the wind blows.

THAT is an umbrella you can kill someone with - or at least beat someone half to death with.

the people who reported him fail then

on a side note, grammar corrected...sorry, i'm annoying

Just trying to keep my tone casual (my rule - forum is a place where people mix and get loud, be easygoing, talk like you do in the real world, avoid abbreviations); I'm trying to not offend by using an easygoing tone (it's subtle, but you'd be surprised one out of place word can change the way someone feels about something) but obviously that had the opposite effect on you XD

I wouldn't use that in a more... official document.

i know you were just pointing out an observation, no offence or anything was taken by it. i've been here for....3 years(?) and so far only 1 person has managed to slightly offend me. i didn't mean anything by my reply, either. that's the problem with written stuff, tone can be hard to read...get it, 'read'...i won't give up my day job!

 

[Caligulove]

Dumb, looks like an umbrella. Also, were you just stopped or actually detained?

Plus try to feel some sympathy for the officers, they're people too- they have to respond to all these batshit insane reports from paranoid or delusional civvies. Imagine if you got a concerned or frightened call about someone carrying around a rifle- only able to gauge their validity through their tone, you'd be alarmed and make sure you brought others along to watch your back. Doesn't seem likely but I imagine you should be ready for anything in that line of work, no matter how strange. Not to mention frustrating when it turns out to be nothing.

It's only in hindsight that we see how retarded the whole situation was.

 

[manaman]

Can anyone justify being more or less detained by cops for carrying THAT?!
on the statement "IT'S AN ASSAULT RIFLE"

I don't think it "just" happened. I hate that phrase. It's and indefinite period of time that can be perceived differently by each person. Did it happen yesterday? An hour ago?

Anyway, are rifles with the distinguishing features that they determine earn the rifle the label of assault rifle illegal where you are at? Because if so they have every right to detain you after they received reports you where carrying one. At least until they csn determine you where in fact not carrying, nor had you been carrying one.

Sorry but your one little over reaction to a brush with the law isn't coming off as more then a minor inconvenience to you that you are blowing way out of proportion.

 

[ultimateownage]

Next you just need to walk down the street with an assault rifle and see how many reports the police get for 'a man walking down the street holding what appears to be a large umbrella'.

 

[Lord Kloo]

I assume you live in the USA. In the UK the cops probably wouldn't come and investigate even if there was factual video evidence of someone trying to reenact Tiananmen Square in Trafalgar.. Our police don't bother much..

Still thats crazy, it would have been funny if they'd arrested you on the charge of having an awesome umbrella..

 

[chainer1216]

first i read the thread title and wondered if you looked like the penguin.

then i saw the picture of the umprella and was gonna say you deserved to be stopped with a handle like that, as there ARE umbrella swords.

then i read the assault rifle part, and i face palmed.


but seriously, no matter how awesome you're umbrella is, its kinda like walking around with an airsoft gun at you're hip. it might not be the real thing, but people around you dont know that and will react as if it were, i learned that the hard way with a bokken.

 

[Buccura]

When I saw the pic, I thought they were suspecting you of carrying a sword. But assault rifle... I broke.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Maybe the person who reported you to the police thought you had one of the Penguin umbrella.

Qucik question where did you buy that umbrella? (Yeah I know you're in the U.S. but I would still like to know) The handle make it look so cool!

 

[XT inc]

My college was sent into lockdown for like 4 hours and had swat roam the campus, after reports of someone with a rifle was wandering the hallways. The problem was, A it was a tripod, and B, it was in the fucking photography wing.

 

[ssgt splatter]

How the hell does that even remotely look like an assult rifle?!

The only way that thing could be a weapon is if you jabbed someone in the ribs with the pointy bit at the end.

 

[the rye]

I had a experiance like this once, i had been forced to dress as a ninja by a friend (they were dressed as a pirate) and i was walking around town with a toy katana (which looked kinda realistic), when suddenly a policeman calmly asked to look at the toy sword i was carrying, he inspected it, saw it was just a toy and said eveything was fine. That matter was resolved swiftly and calmly.

 

[ryai458]

Just don't blame the police. They did what they should have done. After all, they received reports that you carried an assault rifle.

And remember that story about the russian agent who was killed by means of an umbrella with a poisoned tip, huh? Umbrellas are clearly dangerous weapons.

Actually it was an umbrella with a air gun which injected him with a tiny amount of radioactive material that slowly killed him.

 

[Reed Spacer]

I'd have arrested you.

After all, if you opened it inside it'd have caused bad luck, and who knows where that'd gone...

 

[sheogoraththemad]

they probably played resident evil, you can't trust umbrella's

 

[InnerRebellion]

Are you possibly the Penguin? Or do you resemble him? Maybe you do, and a smart ass friend thought he'd fuck with you.

Jokes aside, that's a bit odd... but they were doing their job.

 

[Nocturnal Gentleman]

Why would you carry around an umbrella that looks like a weapon? That seems like something that would get you a run-in with the police sooner or later. It only takes one pair of paranoid eyes after all.

Anyway, the assault rifle thing seems kind of dumb at first, but I don't know about crime in your area. Maybe there was someone caught with an assault rifle in a bust not long ago that you didn't hear much about. I remember seeing a drug bust in my mother's neighborhood and the cops were taking some serious weapons out of that house. The news of the bust didn't really spread that much surprisingly. It did leave some extremely paranoid people from that neighborhood though.