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Superior Court: Lancaster County man’s ‘finger gun’ gesture is a criminal act

He made a gun-like hand gesture toward a man with whom his girlfriend had been feuding and was charged with making a criminal threat. He's not the first.

In this security cam footage submitted as evidence in his case, Stephen Kirchner mimics shooting a gun with his hand at neighbor Josh Klingseisen. The Pennsylvania Superior Court upheld Kirchner's conviction on a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge this week. (Screen grab: WGAL-TV)
In this security cam footage submitted as evidence in his case, Stephen Kirchner mimics shooting a gun with his hand at neighbor Josh Klingseisen. The Pennsylvania Superior Court upheld Kirchner's conviction on a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge this week. (Screen grab: WGAL-TV)Read moreCourtesy of WGAL-TV

While walking with his girlfriend last summer, Stephen Kirchner spotted her neighbor with whom she’d been feuding in Manor Township, Lancaster County, and made a gun-like hand gesture in the man’s direction.

Sure, he thought, brandishing finger guns was only likely to inflame tensions between the bickering residents. But a Pennsylvania appellate court ruled this week that it also constituted a crime.

Superior Court upheld Kirchner’s 2018 conviction on a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, ruling that his firing finger aimed at neighbor Josh Klingseisen “served no legitimate purpose and recklessly risked provoking a dangerous altercation.”

Kirchner’s lawyer said his client has not yet decided whether to appeal or to accept the penalty, a $100 fine. But since the court released its ruling Tuesday, it has drawn national attention and set social media abuzz.

In writing the opinion, Judge Maria McLaughlin made clear that she and the two other appellate judges who heard the case did not view all forms of finger gun — a pervasive gesture frequent on schoolyard playgrounds and favored by campaigning politicians — as a criminal offense. Instead, they based their findings on the particulars of Kirchner’s case.

The dynamic between his girlfriend and Klingseisen was so charged that when Kirchner mimicked “the firing and recoiling of a gun,” he risked causing a fight or further provoking the conflict, McLaughlin wrote.

Neither man could be reached for comment Friday. The bad blood between them originated in a contentious relationship between Klingseisen and Kirchner’s girlfriend, Elaine Natore, who lived next door.

In the weeks leading up to the incident, Natore had obtained a restraining order against Klingseisen, according to court filings. And Klingseisen, in response, had installed six security cameras around his property, which caught Kirchner’s pantomime shooting on video.

Klingseisen told a jury at Kirchner’s 2018 trial in Lancaster County that the hand gesture left him feeling “extremely” threatened. Another neighbor who witnessed the act called the police.

The appellate court cited those reactions in ruling against Kirchner, saying he “acted with a reckless disregard of creating a risk of public alarm, as evidenced by the fact that an eyewitness on the neighboring property called 911 because Kirchner’s actions caused her to feel insecure.”

Despite the attention Kirchner’s case has received, he’s hardly the first to face consequences for indiscriminately firing off his finger.

In 2017, a Florida court ruled against an ex-con who claimed finger guns were speech protected by the First Amendment after he aimed his at an off-duty police officer while saying, “Officer Hernandez, I got you.”

“As almost everyone who was ever a child can testify, no one has ever been killed or injured by forming fingers into the shape of a gun and dropping the hammer,” that man’s lawyer wrote in court filings in his case, the Miami Herald reported. “There is no objective true threat here from that gesture.”

The same year, the NBA fined Washington Wizards guard Brandon Jennings $35,000 for making finger guns at an opposing team’s player during an on-court argument.

The gesture has even forced the grounding of planes. A 2015 American Airlines flight from San Jose, Calif., to Dallas made an unscheduled landing in Phoenix because of an intoxicated passenger’s refusal to stop pointing his finger at flight attendants pretending to shoot them.

For his part, Kirchner, 64, insists he didn’t intend to threaten anyone, let alone spark a yearlong court case, with his ill-timed hand gesture. He says Klingseisen, 35, flipped him off first.

“He gave me the finger,” he told WGAL-TV on Wednesday “I said, ‘Rightbackatcha.’”