anyone read the youtube posts related to this video?
Anyone from the London area shed some light on some of the ruder types of tourists?
The one’s in the video seem to think it’s ok/funny to piss off someone with a rifle.
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I’d be curious to know the breakdown by nationality. Who’s the most intrusive? Most avoidant? Do people from countries with basically non-contact security forces exhibit greater amity or less restraint? Do people from countries where messing with the officially blessed gunmen can, and sometimes does, get you actually shot exhibit greater antagonism or greater caution?
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It’s the United Kingdom, not America!
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As someone who works with the public and is often the object of unsolicited/unwelcome touching, I laughed for at least a few minutes (still afraid to drink anything lest I think of that clip mid swallow).
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For that matter don’t mess with the costumed characters at Disneyland either. It’s bad enough they have to spend their days wearing heavy plush animal costumes in scorching summer heat without a bunch of jackasses giving them a hard time.
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This is a stupid fucking tradition. I know its considered an assault on the Queen herself or some ridiculous bullshit. But a member of the military just pointed a bayoneted loaded assault rifle at a tourist. For touching them on the shoulder.
Think about what you just said. Try saying it correctly: a tourist just touched a member of the military who was patrolling with a bayoneted, loaded assault rifle. Think of any consequences as evolution in action. The tourist was very lucky to survive.
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The silly outfit may be a “stupid tradition” but the rifle is quite real. Try going to Washington D.C. and pulling that kind of behavior on a military guard or Capitol Police officer or member of the Secret Service.
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Or any place in the US can get you shot by the police without any touching involved.
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The highly trained, extraordinarily disciplined, and in the right - member of the military.
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Definitely a real rifle…not as sure as others here that it is actually loaded…and if it’s loaded I AM sure that no round is chambered…
Of course it’s funny! Don’t you remember the I Love Lucy episode where she tries to get one to laugh?
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Stabbing a daft bugger sounds perfectly British to me…
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Not disagreeing at all, but it’s kinda weird that they would still wear those really impractical bear hats.
There’s also his Scots accent…
Wearing a bear for a hat because that used to look tuff. Seriously the big hats are bear fur.
A group of my friends were walking to a train (in the US) and the cops had blocked off a road for crowd control (presumably) reasons. They asked the cops why the road was blocked because they needed to cross, and one of the cops basically told them to fuck off as an explanation. My friends, for the most part, just shrugged it off and walked off because cops are assholes. One of the drunk girls in the group flicked them off as they were walking away. Of course, one of the more stupid and power mad cops sees it and comes running over screaming about how you can’t disrespect a cop. She, being an obnoxious and kind of dumb person herself self started screaming back. So, now you have two screaming idiots, one a cop, and one a drunk with no self control or ability to know when it isn’t worth fighting over, making a scene. The one, very nice, very calm sober dude in the group walks over and tries to calm them both down. He said something to the effect of “hey guys, let’s calm down” and made the mistake of putting his hand gently on both of their shoulders. Obviously, the other cops who had been watching had been waiting for an excuse to kick the shit out someone and so instantly tackled and the beat the shit out of the sober guy trying to clam things down for “assaulting an officer”.
He got arrested and fined, and that makes me sick. It is a clear abuse of power. The cop should have never responded to a boring old middle finger, a bunch of cops shouldn’t have been sitting around looking to gleefully beat the shit out of a guy trying to calm things down, and the judge should have tossed it.
So now, when I say that guy got what was coming to him, understand that I am not an authority apologist. The tourist was being an obnoxious shit, and being scared by a dude he was bugging for the lolz seems like perfectly fine punishment. The gun almost certainly had its safety on, and I figured that the soldier knows not to start pulling the trigger. Maybe that tourist walked away with a new and profound sense of how not to be an asshole in someone else’s country.
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In fairness, the two blokes in the last photo aren’t really wearing funny hats.
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That’s arguably one of the defects of having guards who are mostly there to demonstrate that The Nobility are so important that it is an honor to wear a silly hat and perform ritualized movements for hours in front of their houses; but also, at least in theory, there as at least a component of the security arrangements.
In his capacity as the toy-soldier equivalent of a disneyland costume character, menacing a tourist is pretty excessive.
In his capacity as a remotely useful security guard, having just anyone who knows how to dress like a tourist get behind him and close enough to poke him is somewhere between ‘dumb’ and ‘fatal’.
There’s not a lot the guy wearing the dead bear can do about it; but the two roles should really be separated(and the first probably abolished). If your security arrangements require having armed force on site, you really want it in safer positions, where people of obnoxious but basically harmless intent aren’t encouraged to poke at them, and they can more safely assume that anyone who has gotten that far is a genuine problem. Less aggravation, lower chance of either infiltration or a false-positive tourist bayoneting, and so on.
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Well, they’re Swiss, so “ruthless efficiency” is implied.
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