Kanye West spots something … unusual … about this man’s firearm.
A man looking to collect on a debt broke into the house of 60-year-old woman in Brazil’s Federal District, holding her hostage for ten hours on the business end of a Sega Light Phaser. Fortunately, the man released his hostage, unharmed, after negotiating with police.
It would’ve been more effective if she was an armadillo.
dammit, now the gov’t is gonna confiscate my Master System.
this is why toy guns are usually bright orange or somesuch.
because idioits try and use them to threatedn others and police are too dumb to tell the difference.
Unfortunately, the police can’t tell the difference anymore because some companies are marketing real guns that are painted or otherwise designed to look like toys.
http://images.google.co.in/images?q=real%20guns%20look%20like%20toys&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi
This is why we can’t have the cool LazerTag guns anymore.
Why should the whole toy industry change just because cops are dumb?
(Same goes for school busses… those damned random moving stop signs on the opposite side of the road. Just tell the kids not to cross the road while the bus is unloading them! Why does the whole of traffic law have to change for the special case of “school busses”?)
If you threaten somebody with something that is not immediately and obviously not a real gun, you have to expect them to react as if it were real. It’s not “dumb” to react that way. It’s unreasonable to demand anything else.
Any black gun-shaped object looks like a gun at 100 yards; especially if it’s pointed at you by someone threatening to shoot you. I don’t think it’s “dumb” either.
There’s another picture in this series where the guy has the hostage on the street. He’s waving the light gun around, but he also had two big kitchen knives tucked in his belt.
I’m pretty sure Kotaku actually posted this last week. not kanye… http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/kotaku/full/~3/s-vnmMJpuMA/brazilian-man-holds-woman-hostage-for-10-hours-with-a-sega-light-gun
The Master System was pretty huge in Brazil. Tec Toy keeps a lot of the old Sega hardware still alive in the Brazilian market.
Kanye is such an idiot. Missed the obvious pun:
The hostage was released unphased.
That’s no mere light phaser, it’s a Zillion Gun!
Oh, JJ, how you’ve fallen! What would Apple and Champ say…?
#7: “Any black gun-shaped object looks like a gun at 100 yards; especially if it’s pointed at you by someone threatening to shoot you. I don’t think it’s “dumb” either.”
Exactly. Having been held up at gunpoint myself a couple of times, it’s even harder to tell close-up. Bottom line, if it looks vaguely like a real gun, it’s safest to assume that it is…especially if someone is threatening your life with it.
Until a kid gets shot for pointing a toy at a cop.
So, no, it’s not always safest to assume that it is.
(Logical mistakes like this are why we’ll surely be enslaved by our robotic creations.)
Nobody got shot. Good way to end the day.
Why are all these news stories leaving out the pictures that show he had 2 bigass knives, too? I guess that would not be as good a story…
http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http://g1.globo.com/Noticias/Brasil/0,,MUL1013075-5598,00-POLICIA%2BDIVULGA%2BIMAGENS%2BDE%2BRENDICAO%2BDE%2BSEQUESTRADOR%2BNO%2BDISTRITO%2BFEDERAL.html&sl=pt&tl=en&history_s
#5 “This is why we can’t have the cool LazerTag guns anymore.”
Hey! I still have mine, somewhere.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrhDinWwoyQ
I thought it queer until I saw that it was in Brazil. In Brazil, housewives often subsidize household income by raising virtual ducks for Nintendo. It was those ducks that were threatened.
Speaking of Brazil,
Obama was talking to George W. “we’ve been offered one hundred Brazilian troops to help with the war on terror.”
“A hundred brazillian!” George replied. “Man, that’s more than we’ve got there!”
#12: I came here to say this… and, I actually still have one of these somewhere in the basement! You are so right – that could very well be JJ, years after his TV show got canceled…
The gun itself never worked very well as a “laser tag” system. It worked on a strobe or flash! While it certainly opened up a world of opportunity when it came to using strobe lights as bombs, the real-world performance was sadly lacking.
I’m saving the images from Brazil, in case I ever dig it out and sell it on eBay. How awesome would THAT auction be??
@5, 17: I remember our family even having one of the sensor hats and a Starbase thingy with its massive manual. The old equipment looks so much better than anything new – I just wish I wasn’t 4 or 5 back when I first messed with it
@1 – i want to favorite your comment. memories returned of hours lost to Safari Hunt. then Gangster Town. good lord, a wasted childhood.
It’s only common courtesy to switch to a non-lethal gun symbol after capturing a hostage, it’s a safety measure to make sure you don’t accidentally shoot (and thereby reduce the value of) your negotiation stake.
I wonder if anyone has ever successfully taken a hostage or committed “armed” robbery with just their finger? I’d call that downright gentle terror.
actually, i admire the cops restraint …here in L.A. people routinely get shot with nothing in their hands but sweaty palms
I used to work armed security on my city’s light-rail system. One night, in a less-than-ideal part of town, I found a kid, probably 9 or 10, running around one of our platforms with a very realistic looking handgun. In that neighborhood, many folks – on either side of the law – would have just assumed that it was real.
I waved the kid over and found it to be a soft-air gun. I dumped it’s plastic pellets on the ground, had him put the gun in his pocket and told him to leave it there until he got home.
I was seriously worried that he was gonna get shot if he flashed that thing too often in public.
I’m from Brazil, and I was finding it odd that no local story I read about it even mentioned the Sega gun. The update on the story from the same paper linked above (http://g1.globo.com/Noticias/Brasil/0,,MUL1019632-5598,00-POLICIA+VAI+PERICIAR+ARMA+USADA+EM+SEQUESTRO+DE+DEZ+HORAS+NO+DF.html) now says that the information that it was a toy gun is yet to be confirmed by the police, although it sure looks like one. There is still a possibility mentioned in the article I linked here that it’s a real firearm disguised as a toy, something I didn’t even know they did but apparently there is such a thing going around.
Anyway, despite not being officially confirmed (as far as I know!), I would bet on the Sega gun – it was indeed popular around here back in the day, and I for sure wouldn’t want to check if a gun pointed at me was real or not, so… Anyway, just wanted to update on the local news on that one.
Crazy man! I’ll go see if my light phaser is still somewhere around the house now… 
I was GOING to say that 10 hours is a long time … you’d probably have the opportunity to take plenty of long, hard looks at the gun. 10 hours has got to be enough time to realize it’s a fake, right?
But since the guy had 2 knives to back up his toy gun … nevermind.