Are Amtgard players terrorists?

The G20 was held downtown Toronto this year with all the standard G8 fan fair. The full time protesters that tour around following the big event, smashing windows and lighting fires (Canadian border "what is the purpose of your visit?" Protester "To smash a few windows, maybe burn a local shop to the ground", Canadian border "Welcome to Canada, enjoy your stay") and of corse the standard "more impressive than the last countries security" riot police. All in all it was a pretty normal G20.
But then the media demanded their standard "what the security overzealous?" questions, and the police brought forth a plethora of confiscated weaponry, machetes, crossbows and other dangerous weapons.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/weapons-seized-in-g20-arrests-put-on-display/article1622761/

But if you are a boffer player, LARP-er, or foam fighter you may have noticed something a little off in the Globe and Mail's photos of the weapons. Many of the weapons shown are... foam padded? Foam padded arrows, assorted boffer foam padded clubs and speed bats, foamcore punch shield, and even a poor guys ring lord scale mail vest.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/weapons-seized-in-g20-arrests-put-on-display/article1622761/

A Toronto paper is reported as saying "police also included objects taken from a Whitby, Ont., man who was heading to a role playing fantasy game in Centennial Park Saturday morning. As was reported by the Globe on Saturday, Brian Barrett, 25, was stopped at Union Station for wearing chain mail and carrying a bag with an archery bow, shield and graphite swords. His jousting gear was seized by police, but was on display Tuesday, even though he was not charged and police told a Globe reporter it was a case of bad timing." The stance was a bit of a reversal of their original stance where "Police said darts with cloth on the end were intended to be set on fire."


The Amtgard fighter was named Vaskus and on his way to a local event. He described the days events like this: "I had the Department of Homeland Security pull guns on me and throw me into a chair at Union (Station - subway I think), dump my Amtgard bag out and knife a bunch of my swords and spell balls. They then wrote up a bunch of stuff to charge me with and tossed it over to some Metro Police and walked away. The TO cops were kind enough to realize that charging me with domestic terrorism, firearms possession and resisting arrest was a little exessive. Though they did seize my shields, my scalemail and all my weapons etc. till Tuesday and kept me in supervised detainment for 3 hours."




Sources:
http://www.electricsamurai.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22299&start=15
http://board.belegarth.com/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=35412&hilit=arrows
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/weapons-seized-in-g20-arrests-put-on-display/article1622761/


Once again, this news is a bit old, but our site wasn't around to cover it at the time so I will guess that most haven't heard it, and that makes it worth repeating.