News

Don't point that phone at me!

Leon Ellison went to jail for firing a gun, not for producing a phone in an aggressive threatening manner. The next person to be imprisoned for this sort of offence, however, may be an innocent phone user. And it may be good luck to go to jail, rather than the graveyard.

It is, of course, an offence to carry a replica firearm, and especially, to threaten to shoot someone with it. Ellison didn't carry a replica firearm: his "mobile phone" was nothing of the sort. It was a gun, disguised as a phone.

But phones that aren't phones really are getting common. The ones that look like phones but are actually toys for toddlers, are familiar enough. The new generation include  stun guns, or even  .22 calibre firearms

The horrifying thing - and this isn't a word often used on this site! - is that in operation, this gun looks just like someone dialling a number. The only giveaway is that the "dialpad" has four, instead of three, buttons per row, and the "antenna" is hollow. Well, it would be hollow; it's the barrel of the gun.

The result is that an ordinary phone user could be suspected of pointing a lethal weapon and preparing to shoot. In the wrong circumstances, a jumpy security guard might well see this as a  threatening gesture.

And a sufficiently officious constable could probably get away with arresting you for carrying a replica firearm.

According to South African phone site Cellular Online, police have already warned of exactly this danger. It quotes a source in Germany, Wolfgang Dick (of the German Police Union) as saying: “We find it very, very alarming. It means police will have to draw their weapons whenever a person being checked reaches for their mobile phone.”