Hope it's not a dupe.

You should have gotten this from VCDL, but this is for all you non-email subscribers. (Shame on you)

News Story Link

RICHMOND, Va. — A federal court has rejected an attempt by a Virginia police officer to dismiss a lawsuit filed by The Rutherford Institute on behalf of a man who was arrested as he was engaged in a First Amendment protest against President Obama while lawfully carrying a rifle. The order entered in Brandon Howard v. John Hunter, allows the lawsuit to move forward in which Rutherford Institute attorneys assert that the police violated Howard’s First Amendment right to free speech, Second Amendment right to bear arms, and Fourth Amendment right to be free from a groundless arrest when they confronted him with guns drawn and ordered him to the ground on the unfounded belief that Howard was violating the law by being in public with a rifle slung over his shoulder, when in fact his possession and display of the rifle was wholly legal and did not make him subject to an arrest.  Soon after the incident, the City of Hopewell Police Department has admitted in writing that the incident involved a violation of department policy.

“As this case shows, if you feel like you can’t walk away from a police encounter of your own volition—and more often than not you can’t, especially when you’re being confronted by someone armed to the hilt with all manner of militarized weaponry and gear—then for all intents and purposes, you’re under arrest from the moment a cop stops you,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Certainly, if you’ve been placed in handcuffs and transported to a police station against your will, that constitutes an arrest.”

<SNIP>


I had pretty much forgotten about this.

"someone armed to the hilt with all manner of militarized weaponry and gear"

Really?  This is as bad as the anti gun people over dramatizing stuff.  Their patrol officers carry pistols and some have AR15s, the same things that we argue aren't assault weapons.  Stuff like that isn't really helping the cause.