Let’s say you’re British and you go on vacation to Florida. You eat too many ribs, you get sunburned and, because it’s Florida, you end up holding a shotgun on someone’s porch like you’re auditioning for Duck Dynasty.
You think, Hey, this will make a great update for LinkedIn. You post it. You think nothing of it. And then, back home in the drizzle and gloom of Yorkshire, the police arrive at your front door and throw you in a cell.
This is not fiction. This is the new normal in Britain, where posting a photo with a legally borrowed gun on a different continent can land you in jail. Not because you did anything, but because someone, somewhere, felt something.
Welcome to the weird, soggy corner of the world where feelings have trumped facts and reality has been replaced by feelings.
And Jon Richelieu-Booth, 50, IT consultant, lifelong law-abider, and now accidental poster boy for Britain’s digital thought police, got the full state-funded experience.
It began, like many tech-bro mishaps, on LinkedIn. On August 13, Richelieu-Booth posted a picture of himself holding a shotgun while visiting a friend in rural Florida. That’s it. No manifesto, no threats, no grainy footage with dramatic violin music. Just a man in the land of the Second Amendment, doing what Americans do on weekends.
But the British police don’t care for context. Context is messy. Context involves asking questions and using brains and all sorts of unfashionable nonsense.
Within days, officers appeared at Richelieu-Booth’s home, warning him that “people had been concerned” by the image and that he should consider how it might make others feel.
“Be careful what you say online,” they reportedly suggested.
Because apparently, we now police feelings in this country. Not actions. Not intent. Feelings. It’s as if the West Yorkshire Constabulary has been replaced by a committee of nervous Victorian aunties.
Richelieu-Booth offered to prove the image was taken legally in the US. But no, evidence was not required. So on August 24, officers came back and arrested him.
Not questioned. Arrested. For possessing a firearm with the intent to cause fear of violence, in a photo, and for extra spice, stalking, because apparently a different photo showed a house.
Presumably not his. Or maybe it was his. The whole thing has the clarity of a steamy bathroom mirror.
The charges went nowhere, of course. That would be too embarrassing, even for the state of modern Britain. Even Britain’s increasingly spineless Crown Prosecution Service couldn’t make that soup stick to the bowl. But the police weren’t done. Oh no.
They kept showing up. They arrested him again for allegedly breaching bail conditions, a charge so flimsy it collapsed immediately. Then they reanimated the zombie case by accusing him of a public order offense over a different social media post. They didn’t name it. When he asked for details, none were given. He wasn’t even questioned.
This is justice in 2025. Being prosecuted for a crime no one can describe, involving a post no one can name, from a platform no one can remember. But trust the system, they say.
By the time the whole circus was finally packed away and the CPS, in a rare moment of lucidity, dropped the case entirely, Richelieu-Booth had lost access to his phone, his computers, and, quite rightly, his patience.
“They’ve put me through 13 weeks of hell,” he said. “Anybody should be allowed to say anything they wish, as long as it’s not hateful. When did we get so thin-skinned as a society?”
The answer, Jon, is roughly around the time we decided that protecting people from being mildly uncomfortable on the internet was more important than upholding civil liberties.
The reality here is worse than absurd. It’s dangerous. We have created a world where the state can kick down your door, not because you’ve committed a crime, but because someone felt something about something you posted.
It doesn’t matter that the gun was legal. It doesn’t matter that it was in another country. It doesn’t matter that no threats were made. All that matters is someone somewhere had an emotional flutter and picked up the phone.
Richelieu-Booth said it best. “I’ve always believed in truth and justice and stood up for the police… Now I have no faith in the police.”
That’s the tragedy here. A man who once trusted the system is now actively suing it. And he should. Because if the police can seize your property and arrest you over a holiday snap, nobody is safe.
