The Florida Highway Patrol pulled over a missile truck last week. No, not an official HIMARS artillery system — we mean a Ford Maverick pickup truck sporting a brace of rocket-propelled ordnance in the flatbed. When the cops went to go see who the driver was, they were stunned to discover that it was none other than a Florida Man! Perhaps still reeling from crashing a Mustang through an airport fence, Florida Man (this time going by the alias Michael Nipper) insisted his DIY missile truck was entirely benign and harmless. The highway patrol responded by calling in the bomb squad, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, the Plant City Police Department, and the Plant City Fire Department to set up an emergency perimeter.
Astoundingly, local NBC affiliate WESH reports that the bomb squad confirmed Florida Man’s assertion that these were merely plastic models he’d assembled from a kit. He slips away once again! Nipper claimed these models are for “shows and events,” whatever those might be, per CBS News. The police more or less told him to knock it off, as they’d received a number of calls from concerned locals. He’ll have to transport his missiles another way, and there’s a sentence you just don’t read very often.
The real crime here
Eagle-eyed readers will already see that a crime has been committed here: specifically, a crime against ordnance. That larger model is an AIM-120B AMRAAM, an air-to-air missile. Those aren’t truck-mounted! You fire them from airplanes! Unless Nipper was planning to yeet his Ford off a ramp, that was never going to work right. I’m amazed he wasn’t arrested on the spot.
You’d think Nipper might know a thing or two about this, given the sheer volume military decals his Maverick is rocking. Based on what I can see, Nipper is an Air Force veteran who: worked on an A-10 Warthog, is the son of an Army soldier, is the brother of another Air Force vet, is the father of a Marine, and is the grandfather of at least one Navy sailor. All that, and he still can’t stow his munitions correctly!
I’m not so sure about the white missile, which may not be a missile at all; maybe a model sounding rocket? What say you?
