A city police officer says it isn’t hard to modify a commonly found pen flare to shoot bullets.

A city police officer says it isn’t hard to modify a commonly found pen flare to shoot bullets.



Thunder Bay Police Service officers attended the security office at the Intercity Shopping Centre Monday to investigate what they described as a minor shoplifting incident. While searching the suspected shoplifter, police found a small pen-like tool in the man’s pocket.



Thunder Bay Police Sgt. Rino Belcamino said police found a pen flare that was modified to fire a .22-calibre bullet. The object unintentionally fired when police placed it down on the table.



No one was injured as a result of this incident.



Belcamino said the flare could be bought for around $25 and is meant as a signal device and to repel animals.



“It’s not extremely hard to modify,” Belcamino said. ““You can modify it to fire .22 cartridges. It’s been my experience in the past that (modifications) had been done with these types of pen flares because they do possess a firing pin. It works very similar to a gun. This is very prevalent.”



Belcamino said most of the time people are just curious and the flares are rarely used in crimes.



But there are a lot of safety issues when modifying a pen flare.

Besides the obvious harm of firing the weapon at someone, Belcamino said the flare could explode in the person’s hand because it wasn’t meant to handle firing a round.



He said it’s difficult to combat this type of problem because there isn’t any restriction on flare guns.



The man, who is said to be well known to police, will be charged with several weapons charges and held for court.



Follow Jeff Labine on Twitter @Labine_reporter



