No, not The Onion:
The leadership of the Orlando LEO institutions are a joke. I understand that The House of The Mouse and related business are the ones paying the bills, but it seems that Chief LEOs and top Honchos are ignorant of weapons to the point of ridicule and it does not help that they actually do a Social Media release using Toddler Talk rather than addressing people in a professional manner. Of course, if they are not behaving like idiots, it means they think the regular citizens are idiots that need to be spoken to like they were 4 year olds.
The firearm in the picture (That they at least admit is not the gun recovered) is a Mossberg International 715P Pistol in .22LR, not a rifle . And you are in the Gunshine State, did you think you people in the State would not know the difference?
AFAIK, Disney World isn’t part of Orlando. It’s in the Reedy Creek Improvement District, and you’ll see Orange County cops there, but no Orlando cops.
And, frankly, city cops treat people like kids because most the people they deal with act like kids.
If you don’t believe that the House of the Mouse has large influence all over Central Florida…
An astonishing number of the cops in the Tampa area are from somewhere else, predominately the Northeast, especially New York and New Jersey.
What surprises me most is there seems to be no attempt to teach these sworn officers the local laws.
I have been asked for my pistol’s registration during a traffic stop!
I’d say you’re getting a bit thin-skinned.
We can all debate what the A in AR stands vor, but the R is kinda clear. The distinction between rifle and not-a-rifle is an arbitrary one. Ask any purist and they’ll call a 16″ AR-15 a carbine, not a rifle. Ask for a legal definition and you’ll quite a few different ones (my local one is >=60cm overall, >=30cm barrel).
So let’s not expect non-gunnuts to get this right.
And well, I for once did not recognize it as a Mossberg 715, mainly because I don’t do .22lr at all. I thought “uh, low front sight, smart choice on a pistol config” first, then “no buffer tube, how neat, is that some gun by PWS or Z-M?” and finally “thank god I stopped trying to keep up with all those weird new magazines coming out”.
I had to identify the black spot on the bolt as charging handle to recognize it as some copy of the CZ v22 blowback mechanism.
AR stands for Armalite…
@Tierlieb – Sorry, but police officers whose job it is to uphold the law should absolutely be able to say “short barrel and overall length, no stock…that’s a pistol”. It’s not a gun-nut vs. non thing. It’s that that’s literally their job to know how the law classifies these things.
And it doesn’t require knowledge about the specific gun. The law doesn’t categorize guns by make and model. It just makes the definition based on characteristics. I’ve never seen that model of firearm before in my life. But I know the law (like an officer of the law should) so therefore I know it would be a pistol instantly just by looking at it.
Actually, both the A and the R stand for Armalite – as you can tell by the fact that Armalite came out with firearms other than rifles that used the AR-# designation.
When I saw that, my first thought was “hey, that’s a Mossberg 22 pistol” because my wife has one and I’ve handled it enough to recognize it. (FYI, Tlerlleb, the thing that looks like a charging handle is molded plastic and totally non-functional).
I think the OPD comes across as not knowing what they’re doing. I can see that in the case of the officers, it’s reasonable and prudent when they see something that looks like this to assume it’s a 5.56 pistol. Not that anybody wants to stand in front of a .22LR and say, “sure, go ahead and shoot me”. But once they had the guy in custody and the weapon, they should have seen the difference and handled it differently. Assuming the picture represents what they recovered and isn’t another screw up itself.
Of Mickey were my boss a mouse gun would scare me too.
To paphrase “A Few Good Men” …scary gun? “Is there any other kind?”
Armalite Rifle.
Eagle Arms has much to answer for, including that perversion of the original name of the gun in their advertising.
Hhhmmmm, pointed it at the cops and then the vehicle fled….under a hail of bullets fired by the cops?? I dont know about cop laws in Florida,but in my state you point a gun at me,you better be bullet proof cause I will do my best to out shoot youl
Any other part of Florida that would have been the response. MMPD? Not so sure