Posted on 01/14/2014 5:49:44 PM PST by servo1969
John Filippidis, silver-haired family man, business owner, employer and taxpayer, is also licensed to carry a concealed firearm.
He’d rather he didn’t feel the need, “but things aren’t like they used to be. The break-ins, the burglaries, all the crime. And I carry cash a lot of the time. I’m constantly going to the bank.
“I wanted to be able to defend my family, my household and the ground I’m standing on. But I’m not looking for any trouble.”
Filippidis keeps his gun — a palm-sized Kel-Tec .38 semiautomatic, barely larger than a smartphone in a protective case — in one of two places, always: in the right-hand pocket of his jeans, or in the safe at home.
“There are kids in the house,” Filippidis says, “and I don’t think they’d ever bother with it, but I don’t want to take any chances.”
He’s not looking for any trouble, after all.
Trouble, in fact, was the last thing on his mind a few weeks back as the Filippidises packed for Christmas and a family wedding in Woodridge, N.J., so he left the pistol locked in the safe. The state of Florida might have codified his Second Amendment rights, but he knew he’d be passing through states where recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions affirming the rights of individuals to keep and bear arms have been met by hostile legislatures and local officials.
“I know the laws and I know the rules,” Filippidis says. There are, after all, ways gun owners can travel legally with firearms through hostile states. “But I just think it’s a better idea to leave it home.”
So there the Filippidises were on New Year’s Eve eve, southbound on Interstate 95 — John; wife Kally (his Gulf High sweetheart); the 17-year-old twins Nasia and Yianni; and 13-year-old Gina in their 2012 Ford Expedition — just barely out of the Fort McHenry Tunnel into Maryland, blissfully unarmed and minding their own business when they noticed they were being bird-dogged by an unmarked patrol car. It flanked them a while, then pulled ahead of them, then fell in behind them.
“Ten minutes he’s behind us,” John says. “We weren’t speeding. In fact, lots of other cars were whizzing past.”
“You know you have a police car behind you, you don’t speed, right?” Kally adds.
Says John, “We keep wondering, is he going to do something?”
Finally the patrol car’s emergency lights come on, and it’s almost a relief. Whatever was going on, they’d be able to get it over with now. The officer — from the Transportation Authority Police, as it turns out, Maryland’s version of the New York-New Jersey Port Authority — strolls up, does the license and registration bit, and returns to his car.
According to Kally and John (but not MTAP, which, pending investigation, could not comment), what happened next went like this:
Ten minutes later he’s back, and he wants John out of the Expedition. Retreating to the space between the SUV and the unmarked car, the officer orders John to hook his thumbs behind his back and spread his feet. “You own a gun,” the officer says. “Where is it?”
“At home in my safe,” John answers.
“Don’t move,” says the officer.
Now he’s at the passenger’s window. “Your husband owns a gun,” he says. “Where is it?”
First Kally says, “I don’t know.” Retelling it later she says, “And that’s all I should have said.” Instead, attempting to be helpful, she added, “Maybe in the glove [box]. Maybe in the console. I’m scared of it. I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I might shoot right through my foot.”
The officer came back to John. “You’re a liar. You’re lying to me. Your family says you have it. Where is the gun? Tell me where it is and we can resolve this right now.”
Of course, John couldn’t show him what didn’t exist, but Kally’s failure to corroborate John’s account, the officer would tell them later, was the probable cause that allowed him to summon backup — three marked cars joined the lineup along the I-95 shoulder — and empty the Expedition of riders, luggage, Christmas gifts, laundry bags; to pat down Kally and Yianni; to explore the engine compartment and probe inside door panels; and to separate and isolate the Filippidises in the back seats of the patrol cars.
Ninety minutes later, or maybe it was two hours — “It felt like forever,” Kally says — no weapon found and their possessions repacked, the episode ended ... with the officer writing out a warning.
“All that time, he’s humiliating me in front of my family, making me feel like a criminal,” John says. “I’ve never been to prison, never declared bankruptcy, I pay my taxes, support my 20 employees’ families; I’ve never been in any kind of trouble.”
Face red, eyes shining, John pounds his knees. “And he wants to put me in jail. He wants to put me in jail. For no reason. He wants to take my wife and children away and put me in jail. In America, how does such a thing happen? ... And after all that, he didn’t even write me a ticket.”
Now, despite having fielded apologies from the officer’s captain as well as from a Maryland Transportation Authority Police internal affairs captain, John is wondering if he shouldn’t just cancel his CCW license.
For a guy who’s not looking for trouble, that’s not an unreasonable conclusion. And it would please fans of gun control by any means. But let’s hope John Filippidis, American family man, taxpayer and good guy, doesn’t cave, because it would be a sad statement about the brittleness of our guarantees — some would call them sacred — under the Constitution.
Its obvious that the driver was profile being he was from a CCW state. The cop must have thought he had a fish, because Maryland has strict laws and no one in MD would ever think of having a gun on them. If they were so concerned about guns, maybe the cop should be reassigned to Baltimore. He’d catch a lot of fish there for sure if he stopped every car in town.
Isn’t that the truth, I can’t believe his wife did that!!! Not at all mitigating what that jackboot did, but she didn’t help her own husband’s case!
Yes, I’d like to email him/his dept and tell them what for. I don’t have any guns, the dog ate them.
“Journalists” who know the difference between .38 caliber and 9mm kurtz (.380 auto) are exceptionally rare...
Heck, I don’t care if I ever go north of the Mason-Dixon line anymore, and even some states below it now are iffy. I used to blithely drive by myself from Mississippi to Virginia to visit family-after reading a few years ago about a rash of assaults/rapes in broad daylight at service stations, I won’t drive there alone anymore. And haven’t flown in years, don’t feel up to being groped and treated worse than an illegal border-jumper by the government’s little Hitlers.
Our family rule of thumb in such situations-if my husband says it, I back it up.
Warning about the robotized Oprified ‘guns re terrible, they frighten me, Gee, I just wish you would get them out of out home’ mentality too many American woman have been brainwashed into by sitting in front of their TV sets absorbing the poison from ‘women's programs’.
turning maryland into scaryland
Fishing expedition.
“NY, MD, CT, NJ, NH, D.C., RI, MA, and IL”
I would say that’s a fairly complete EASTERN list of no-go areas...
Baltimore?
What, go somewhere... actually... DANGEROUS?
No fair! No fair!
According to most journalists, what you have there is a “concealed semi-automatic assault pistol”.
And soon we get into a contest of who can outsnoot the rest. Oh look at me I am so special! I am so particular I won’t even set foot on the globe!
OK, being facetious.
But if there were a philosophy destined to turn the United States into the Completely Untied States that would be it.
The latest Gallup Poll on guns says that 47 percent of Americans now have guns, more than any time since 1993, and women are buying in increasing numbers. Twenty-three percent of women report that they are gun owners, that is up from 13 percent in 2005.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/02/06/seen-at-11-new-research-shows-gun-purchases-by-women-on-the-rise/
Seriously, why let a bunch of jerks snatch away seriously large regions of territory. We *ARE* thinking about the good of the USA aren’t we? Not necessarily of our atomized selves? We are so afraid we’ll get cooties from liberals that we won’t even go where liberals ARE and so we cede great areas to liberals.
To me, redneck land is wherever I go. (There are a fair number of redneck outposts in Maryland. I’ve seen them.) And I feel more sorry for the asses than I feel mad at them. Sure that was a stink situation, but look at the big picture — there is going to be blowback just from the way they are treating guns. The more they treat guns as horrible things that will jump up and do dastardly deeds all on their lonesome, the more they will be scared of them. Their cowardly finickiness will punish itself.
Welcome to the USSA, comrades.
Sometimes I wonder if a good guffaw at these fools would do more good than drawing ourselves up to our full height and getting all huffy.
I do think we would profit from putting a more positive face on militia. This is your neighbor or mine who is willing to take a risk in order to stop a danger to families and neighborhoods. In many cases, more risk than most modern cops want to take. (We won’t “shoot first and ask questions later” nearly as often, partly because we know we are going to be hyper-accountable. Lazy, easy shootings, other than by criminals who know they are criminals, are generally perpetrated by our modern cowardly police.) Don’t be afraid to tread on toes with the truth. it might get you knocked back in the short run. In the long run, you are going to get choruses of Amens like you would not believe.
Be careful yes. Lock yourself up in a prison of fear, no.
God never left His throne.
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