I just got off the phone with Army Master Sergeant C. J. Grisham, a serving American soldier and veteran of the the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who recently was illegally disarmed by the Temple Police Department while out for a walk with his son.
“We live out in the country in Texas, near Temple,” he told me. “My son and I were on a ten-mile hike so that he could earn his hiking merit badge – it’s the last badge he needs to become an Eagle Scout.” But half way into the hike, Grisham said, “a police officer pulled up.” Initially, he was “cordial” and he “asked what we were doing.” Grisham told him. “Then he looked at my rifle. I carry a rifle any time I walk around because there are feral hogs and cougars and things like that.”
From here, things took a turn for the worse.
“‘Where you going with that rifle?’ he asked me. I said, ‘does it matter? Am I breaking any laws?’” Then, he says, the officer “grabbed the rifle without telling me – but it was attached to me. My immediate reaction as a combat veteran was to grab it back and then take a step back. I asked him what he was doing. So he pulled his gun on me. Then I thought about my son, so I put my hands off my gun and he told me to move over to the car. Luckily my son had the video camera to document the hike for his merit badge. I told him to turn it on.”
The video of the incident is below. I’d recommend you watch the whole thing. Note the officers’ ignorance of the rules they are there to uphold, the suggestion that the law doesn’t apply in this “day and age,” and the persistent claim that American citizens are presumed to have their weapons illegally unless otherwise demonstrated. Note the officer’s claim that merely owning a gun makes someone dangerous. Note the conflation of a soldier in a war zone with a citizen in rural Texas. Note the persistent refusal to explain what law Grisham has broken.
Read more: nationalreview.com
