Posted on 08/12/2012 6:10:58 PM PDT by marktwain
Colorado Springs police say an outdated “cheat sheet” for police officers on city laws may have led to the mistaken arrest of a 24-year-old man for openly carrying a 40-caliber gun at Pride Fest on July 21.
According to city and state law for almost a decade, people are allowed to openly carry guns in city parks.
“He was right and we were in the wrong, definitely,” said Barbara Miller, police spokeswoman.
That admission doesn’t mean much to James Sorensen, who says he’s looking for a lawyer after he was detained by police for more than an hour that day when police spotted his gun at his side.
Gun rights issues have been fervently debated since the Aurora theater shootings that left 12 people dead and dozens wounded. Some people suggest that if more law-abiding citizens carried guns such random shooting incidents would end more quickly and with fewer victims. Others believe that more guns at such a scene would’ve caused more deaths.
Regardless, even some gun rights activists point out that openly carrying firearms in public can cause fear.
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Sorensen said he was heading to his vehicle from the event at Acacia Park downtown when an officer asked him to leave. When Sorensen asked the officer for his identification, he said he was detained and eventually arrested. His partner taped the altercation with police and put it on You Tube. During the 13-minute video, Sorensen became more and more agitated and continued to ask the half-dozen officers there if he could leave. They told him he couldn’t.
(Excerpt) Read more at gazette.com ...
From the comments at the site:
So, what you are saying is that police are arresting and detaining citizens and they don’t really know and understand the laws that they are enforcing? SHOCKER! Somebody is going to get the crap sued out of them... the police officers as individuals first, then the city sounds about right. I watched the youtube video. He wasn’t being combative, he was trying to get the police to understand the law that they should already know. See what happened first hand in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5TzoDTH_zM&feature=share.
So it's always best to let the mass shooter finish his business unchallenged?
Well you never know, gun owners might just decide to join in at a mass shooting and kill hundreds. /s
hurry get a Mouthpiece sue their pants off ...send a message....! Let the word go forth...respect the SECOND AMENDMENT TO THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION...or Pay the Piper....
a pride fest they call it why not call it what it really is.
Off topic but why th ehell do some feel the need to have a prade to announce their fecal matter sex
Naturally packin’?
Notice how the reporters always try to get the word ‘caliber’ into the lead?
Oddly enough, this is kind of a double whammy. That is, police could *improperly* detain him because he was armed, but they could also *improperly* detain him because he was a homosexual.
This is an important element of gun rights that needs to be understood: guns are essential to protect oppressed minorities against abuse. And in past, those who sought to oppress them strongly supported gun control measures to keep them disarmed.
In his case, *while* the police have been trained to tolerate homosexuals without abusing them; *and* they have been trained to tolerate open carry; the question has to be asked: did the police detain him because he was a homosexual with a gun?
Most often, gun rights advocates would agree that “black with a gun” strongly increases the possibility that the police will want to intervene, because while they might ignore “black” and they might ignore “gun”, they cannot bring themselves to ignore “black with a gun.”
But the future of gun rights advocacy includes convincing minorities who feel oppressed that they need guns for self defense as much or more than everyone else.
Interesting that the police tolerated the camera and did not want to get physical. Scared of gay blood? Or gay rights?
Gun control in Michigan was rooted in racism.
In 1927 Dr Ossian Sweet had the audacity to move into a white neighborhood. When the angry mob attacked, Sweet killed two of them. He and his entire family were charged with murder. Happily an all white jury acquitted all of them.
Within weeks there were calls for the state to create county gun boards to decide who could carry a weapon. Naturally blacks were almost always deemed to be a danger. It didn’t take long for them to realize that they could exclude a whole bunch of different folks from having guns.
I’m of the mind that ANY free man can carry. If he’s too dangerous to carry a gun, he should be in prison anyway. If he gets out of prison then he should be allowed to carry.
Not too uncommon from what I have head .... at Pride parades they like to have their guns out in the open ... will slit their pants to accomodate!
...I have heard ....
They would if it were more common, which is the point of exercising the right. Many places in the USA people have guns in racks in plain sight in their vehicles, no one calls the cops and if they did the cops would ignore the call.
> “If he gets out of prison then he should be allowed to
> carry.”
That’s a hard call, for several reasons. The first is, while most states allow gun rights restoration to ex-cons, they almost always require the approval of a judge to do so. And in all fairness, most judges are pretty good about restoration, except for ex-cons that fit into several categories: high likelihood of violent recidivism; who have expressed a desire for revenge; have membership in criminal organizations; and those who were incarcerated though mentally ill, and yet have never been institutionalized. I’m sure there are other factors I haven’t considered as well.
In each of these cases, they can be mild enough so that they should not have life sentences, yet need individual judgment as to whether they should have their rights restored.
However, federal law does need to change, because once a federal felon for anything, there is not even a process by which gun rights can be restored. And this is clearly wrong.
Don’t be fooled by the word “prison”. Gun rights are lost for a whole lot of reasons that are unlikely to put a man in prison.
That said, if they’re that dangerous don’t let them out of prison. If you do let them out of prison, do what we did till early in the 1900s and hand their guns back at the gate.
Packing fudge - just super.
Packing heat - no no, girlfriend.
Hope he sues the crap out of the cops. This is stuff that gets innocent civilians killed by overzealous and incorrect cops.
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