Honestly, I think that's a little out of line.
It seems to me that as I understand the situation, you were entirely within your rights to carry the weapons you carried. And I don't read anything in your story that suggests that the police violated you rights.
The point of my post is that actions have consequences - the older I have gotten, the more I have learned to accept the consequences of my actions. As the old blues line goes, "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime."
When I was quite a bit younger, I used to do a lot of hitchhiking. That meant a lot of encounters with police officers late at night on lonely roads, etc. Even though I looked and acted like most of my hippie friends - as I was one of them, I never had any hassles. Even as an always stoned hippie, I realized four things:
- Constitutional issues are resolved in courts, not on the street. Maybe sometimes I was stopped/frisked when I shouldn't have been. But I wasn't going to win that one on the street.
- Being a police officer can be a very dangerous line of work. When they stopped me, they didn't know - at first - if I was some wandering stoned hippie or an escaped con who looked like a wandering stoned hippie.
- I really, really, wanted them to find the aforementioned escaped con before I stumbled on him under a bridge abutment at 3:00 AM. So it was in my interest that they do their jobs.
- I really just wanted to be on my way. I was hitchhiking because I wanted to be somewhere else.
So I answered questions - volunteered information - and went on down the road.
I respected people who sought a confrontation, got a confrontation, and finally got most of the vagrancy laws overturned as unconstitutional.
I respected folks who avoided a confrontation.
In fact, at one officer's suggestion after a stop in NJ, when an officer first approached me, I kept my hands in the clear where the office could see them - instead of immediately reaching for ID when they walked up. Then, when they asked for ID, I would tell them which pocket the ID was and which hand I was going to retrieve it with. To a man, when I did that, they smiled, and the situation grew a lot more relaxed. And I got on down the road faster.
I couldn't understand people who sought confrontation and then complained when they got one. I had friend who wanted to confront "the pigs" at every opportunity. Then they were surprised when the got "hassled by the man". Even to my drug addled brain 35 years ago, that didn't make any sense. I actually never encountered anything but courteous professional behaviour - some friendlier than others.
I am not suggesting that you do what I did. But if you enter into the interaction with a macho, "I don't volunteer information to cops!" attitude, you should expect that they will respond appropriately. My guess is that if you had announced you had a CCW earlier, things might have been more relaxed. For reasons of self-preservation, they absolutely need to take control of your weapons in that situation - or face the potential of not making it home at the end of shift.
Mike
It's not all like on COPS. They take an entire 12 hr shift and sift through all the "good calls" that get funneled to one car.
