A concealed carrier in Reddit’s r/CCW told a story that started with a quick stop at his daughters’ softball practice and turned into an arrest he says never should have happened. According to his post, he was on the way to go fishing when his wife texted asking him to bring a pair of shorts for one of their daughters. He stopped at the city park, dropped off the shorts, and crouched behind home plate to take a few pictures while the girls were up to bat. He wrote that the wind briefly flipped up the back of his shirt, exposing his firearm for a moment before he pulled the shirt back down. A short time later, he saw two city police officers and a K-9 approaching him. You can read the original Reddit thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CCW/comments/wu9iee/locked_up_for_not_knowing_my_rights_fl/ (Reddit)
From the way he described it, the stop escalated immediately. He said officers shoved him into the fence, removed his firearm, and handcuffed him in front of his daughters and the rest of the team. He wrote that the officers then asked if he wanted to “go have a talk,” but instead of walking him off somewhere private, they took him a short distance away and ordered him onto his knees. He believed he had done nothing illegal because, in his view, Florida law allowed him to be armed while going to and from a fishing trip, and he thought his stop at the park fell under that protection.
That legal point is where the whole story began to split. In his post, he said that when officers asked about a permit, he answered honestly that he had submitted the paperwork and was waiting on it, but that he was on the way to a constitutionally protected activity and had only made a quick stop. According to him, the officers were not interested in that explanation. He wrote that as soon as he said he did not yet have a permit, they decided to lock him up and did not want to hear anything else. Then, instead of taking him directly to jail, he said they kept him for about four hours, questioned him, and tried to get him to help them with a drug-related undercover situation before eventually cutting him loose on a sworn complaint.
The stranger part of the story came later. He said that about a month after the park incident, plainclothes officers came back to the same practice field and arrested him officially. By then he had hired a lawyer he described as highly respected on Second Amendment and constitutional issues. He wrote that his attorney appeared with him at first appearance, challenged the case aggressively, and quickly demanded body-camera footage and departmental records. According to the post, the charges were dropped less than a week later, and he said even the state attorney would not give him a clear explanation why. He also said police kept his gun for more than a month after the charges were gone and that he was trespassed from the city park during the aftermath.
The legal argument in the thread turned almost immediately to the Florida fishing exception. The poster insisted the officers had no reasonable suspicion to stop him in the first place because they did not know whether he had a permit before detaining him. He also argued that the evidence against him would have been vulnerable under the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine if the initial detention was unlawful. But several commenters pushed back hard on his reading of the law and said his stop at the softball practice was likely too substantial to count as just a momentary interruption on the way to fishing. One commenter quoted Florida Statute 790.25(3)(h), which allows firearm possession for a person “engaged in fishing, camping, or lawful hunting or going to or returning from” such an activity, and argued that stopping at a park to watch practice and take pictures was not the kind of brief detour that exception was meant to cover.
That disagreement is what gave the thread most of its conflict. The poster kept insisting the state would have “had me dead to rights” if the law were as clear-cut as critics claimed, and used the fast dismissal as proof that something was wrong with the arrest. Skeptical commenters said the story sounded too wild to believe in full, especially the part about being pulled into undercover work and then arrested later in plain clothes at the same field. Others wanted to see the bodycam footage or the newspaper article he said supported his version. In later comments, he doubled down, saying he had the arrest paperwork, expected a federal lawsuit, and believed his rights had been violated from the start.
The comments broke into two camps. One side focused on the Fourth Amendment angle and thought the officers went too far too fast, especially if all they really had was a brief glimpse of a gun. Those readers were angry that he had allegedly been cuffed in front of his children, kept for hours, and then re-arrested later after the initial charges did not seem to hold. The other side focused on the Florida carry exception and said he was stretching it too far by treating a stop at a softball practice as part of a fishing trip. To them, the arrest may have been messy, but the underlying problem was that he was concealed carrying without a permit while making a stop that did not fit the exception cleanly.
What lingers most in the post is how quickly a tiny public exposure — just enough for someone to see a firearm while he was taking pictures — turned into a handcuffed scene in front of his daughters. Whether someone reads the law his way or the commenters’ way, that is the part that clearly stayed with him. He was not writing only about a gun charge. He was writing about the way an ordinary family stop at a park blew up in front of his kids, and how the case later unraveled enough that even prosecutors did not carry it forward.
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