“Police this week arrested a man they say had been openly carrying an AR-15 rifle in Lincoln and calling 911 on himself, pretending to be a concerned citizen.” So reports the Lincoln Journal Star. It seems young Master Benjamin Brantner was doing his level-best to provoke a disproportionate police response.
Exactly what Brantner’s motive was is anyone’s guess. Is he an open carry advocate looking for an overzealous reaction to an openly carried “assault rifle” and maybe an eventual payday from the city? Could be.
Is he another in a long succession of left-leaning hoaxters trying to fraudulently demonstrate the plight of people of color at the hands of an inherently racist society and jack-booted white supremacists in uniform? Maybe.
Whatever his motive, Brantner was risking his own health, if not his life, had the responding Lincoln police officers acted as he hoped they would. Unfortunately for him, they were very professional throughout.
The first call on Benjamin Brantner, 19, came Tuesday, when someone alerted police to a man walking around University Place with an AR-15 rifle, Officer Angela Sands said.
Five officers rushed to the area, Sands said, because the caller sounded afraid and they were suspicious. They arrived at North 48th Street and Walker Avenue and determined Brantner was lawfully carrying the rifle, Sands said.
When that didn’t work, he tried it again a couple of days later. Only he forgot that caller ID is a thing these days.
On Wednesday, police fielded a similar call, this time near 31st and Randolph streets. That call came from the same phone number that had previously reported Brantner’s activity.
Officers learned the phone number belonged to Brantner, Sands said. They responded to the area and found Brantner with his AR-15 rifle, looking around as if he was anticipating police, she said.
First, congrats to Lincoln’s finest for their professional response to legal open carry, however disappointing that may have been to this contemptible fraud. Brantner was arrested and is now facing a charge of obstructing government operation which is apparently Nebraskan for making phony calls to the local cop shop. He’s now out on bail.
There’s no word as to whether the police have taken custody of his AR. In any case, he richly deserves both our ridicule and the coveted honor of being TTAG’s Gun Zero of the Day.
Did he have a camera crew standing by?
Such a rich and vibrant culture! Can’t blame him for trying to hit the ghetto lottery…
Leave it to a Brother from another mother to try & start some sh!t.
Sounds like Yet Another Attention Whore.
The country is becoming overrun with them.
Ageeed!!!
Yep and most of them wear blue costumes and carry costume jewelry.
Facebook/social media addiction manifesting itself as tangible, real-world insanity?
Let me just say this about that:
I knew social media was out of control when my department was paged out to an auto accident, and when we arrived, the occupants of the car were too busy posting pics of their accident scene on social media to pay attention to us. “Are you injured?” “Hang on, I’m just going to get a picture of this…”
As a result, I eventually became rather short with them – “You called 911, and I left the dinner table, and I’m sure my fellow FF’s left their dinners, to come here and respond to YOU and YOUR ACCIDENT. If you don’t put those stupid phones away right now, we’re leaving and we’ll tell the other services to turn around their response because you’re too busy playing with your phones.”
That got a response.
If I could go back to 1991 and basically un-invent the modern Internet, I’m almost to the point where I would do so, even if it meant giving back all my stock option money.
Well said, sir!
Reckon what constitutes lawful carry in Nebraska?
What is Nebraska’s Open Carry Law? And does it cover Open Carry by Patriots of “Color” other than “White”…
There is no open carry law in Nebraska. Except Omaha or one of its suburbs where it’s illegal.
Replace “illegal” with “subject to a may-issue permitting process” and this statement is accurate.
This seems to be a new wrinkle on “death by cop”. Instead of being a mass school murderer he hoped the cops would shoot him as a way of “proving” that cops were racists and become a famous dead celebrity. Nuts.
Swatsturbation.
Are we not done with trying to poke the bear (LEO) yet?’
Texas got Open Carry a few years back. I rarely see Open Carry, unless on a ranch walking a small dog and Mr. Cayote or Mr. Fox shows up for a snack.
Every once in a while will see Motorcycle Club filling up at gas pumps, will see open carry occasionally.
For the first year Texas had Open Carry, I kept a mental tally of how many Open Carriers I saw over the next twelve months… answer: 18.
And I work in a gun store.
So no, open carry isn’t something we see much of and I don’t expect it to become fashionable… but I’m happy we have it anyway.
🤠
Terminally ill looking for a payday to take care of his family? Or just another SJW looking for 15 minutes?
Not terminally ill.
Nerminally stupid.
Maybe he’s a Huskers signed recruit who decided he’d rather go to a less boring school.
This like masterbating, but stopping yourself before you can finish to punish someone else … neither accomplish the end goal and you’re weird for doing both.
Hilarious… trying to get arrested for open carry (while black) and instead gets arrested for the fake report.
That’s some fine policework, there, boys (no sarcasm intended).
What a prick. SMH
I’ve had a concealed carry permit from the Stste of Alaska ever since they started issuing them maybe 20+ years ago. I never actually carried but the permit allowed me to have a handgun hidden under a hat or towel on the front seat of my car or truck. Alaska never used to have problems with carjackings or thefts from homes or vehicles and almost no one was killed by a stranger… it was mostly because of domestic flights between couples. Then came the loser popular, usually people escaping warrants or bail review hearings or sentancing dates… Now we have a growing population of people who think their lives matter more than people who have lived here for 40+ years. There are a lot of indigenous peoples here who are preyed on but there are a lot of people like me (retired Fire/Medic/Police) and military and just plain grumpy old men and women who have had enough. Heroin is now rampant from These Lives Matter junkies and bums. I can talk about narcotics because I used to be treated with them and they truly are highly addictive. Quitting was worse than any burn or broken bone I ever suffered in the fire department and they did not have treatment programs where i lived or a Suboxone program. But i threw away over 320 pills one night and after 10 days of agony i was done. The docs, who did not help me, said that no one has ever died from straight forward withdrawals from narcotics but apparantly there are few people as determined as me.
We all carry now and as an added benefit your State Concealed Carry permit can function as a NICS exempt card for five years at a time.
It certainly doesn’t help that they have all these Alaska based reality TV shows. Must open the floodgates into that state. No longer America’s best kept secret. The worst must be the yuppies moving in and taking with them all of their noise-complaint tendencies and driving home prices up.
He needs a psychiatrist and a swift kick.
Kids will do anything for attention.
Well duh homie…attention whore got attention!😄😧😏😎💀
This is almost too stupid to be true. If he wanted to commit suicide by cop It ain’t that hard. Shoot at them. They will shoot back. If he wanted 15 minutes of fame, call that Hogg kid. His has about played out. I’m sure he’d like to jump in front of a camera again. If it’s racial, call the Southern Poverty Law Center. Though I doubt anyone working there lives in poverty. If it was just plain stupidity? Please don’t breed.
“First, congrats to Lincoln’s finest for their professional response to legal open carry,”
+100,000
Tough call, tough play, great job.
First I would say that race relations are pretty good with the police if a black man can walk around with an AR-15 rifle and the white cops see he’s not bothering anybody and leave the area.(smile)
Because of the Mulford act in the “liberal” State of California a black man would be arrested as many others have been who were openly carrying firearms.
This certainly is a new tactic of the left to travel to states where you can exercise your second amendment rights and they will act stupidly, and try to provoke a confrontation that will get the cameras going and also perhaps cause gun restrictions to be passed.
Attention whore.
Well, there’s one guy who is never going to be recruited to play football at Nebraska (see next post).
The man who ‘swatted’ himself!
DrDKW
This just confuses me. At first, I wanted to say that they should have killed the SOB and be done with it. However, he wasn’t doing anything stupid with it. Just carrying it. My guess is he tried suicide by cop, but for some reason, didn’t have the balls to actually commit any crimes to provoke the cops.
Safe guess is he be stupid.
Typical
It seems to me that he is trying to commit suicide b y cop, and therefore needs to be committed to a facility to be evaluated as to his sanity. Suicidal people generally loose their right to own firearms, which would solve this nit-wit’s problem.
If he was really serious about it, he would have done it in Chicago.
This clown’s arrest, followed by charging and trial along with appropriate punishment if found to have violated existing laws exactly what should transpire.
You can not fix stupid.
I think these crazy kids today do things like shoot-up a school because they want “to be famous on the internet.” Decades ago, kids plastered graffiti all over everything in an effort to let the human race know the kids existed. Today, it’s kill a dozen grade-schoolers for fifteen minutes of fame on CNN.