Mayor James Schiliro of Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, a member of Michael Bloomberg’s MAIG coalition, is in some hot water. Charges haven’t been filed yet, but that’s because police have been rounding up evidence and executing search warrants to fully investigate him for using a city police officer to shuttle a friend to his house, providing alcohol to that minor friend upon arrival, and then holding that underage friend hostage – with three handguns – in his home while his teenage daughter was in the house. He also fired off a round that, fortunately, didn’t hit anyone. (Part of the evidence recovered included a spent casing and what sounds like a section of that floor.)
Interestingly, MAIG has already scrubbed his name from their public lists. They are getting faster at trying to hide their role as a network of criminal mayors.
“. . .a network of criminal mayors.”
You slipped into a little redundancy in that last sentence.
One of my favorite memories of a local official is of a local mayor, some years ago, who was reputed to get together with one of his buddies of a Saturday night to get mutually shitfaced. At the time I had just emerged as a sorta conservative civic activist, and one Saturday night he called me up and started to beat my ear about how lovely the world was going to be “when we get the ovens going again.”
I suppose he assumed something from my surname, but I was surprised he was so unguarded with a total stranger. But the point of the story is, if you think the kind of people who work their way to the pinnacles of local municipal government are some sorts of models of civic and moral virtue — think again. That is independent of ideology, as the guy in question was certainly of populist conservative leanings.
But I guess I’ve made a point that doesn’t need to be reinforced too much, right?
Do you still have the recording? You did record it, right?
I think that’s illegal in Pennsylvania. But if I had recorded every phone conversation with whack-jobs, civilian and government, I had in roughly 30 years of activism, I would have a warehouse filled with mini-cassette tapes. And only a small handful of them would contain anything that deserves proving.
Incidentally, someone recently suggested obliquely that I “name names” with such stories. Since they are not provable, that of course would be slander. But it’s really not very important who said it, to make the not-very-profound point that there are lots of unsavory people out there with unsavory, slightly-hidden agendas; and those that are on “our” side do not do much to help the RKBA (or other issues.) Nor does it help much to delude ourselves that they don’t exist.
Perhaps so, but we seem to have far fewer of those kinds of people on our side, and I’m not sure that’s to our benefit. The anti’s seem to have gotten far further fighting dirty, given the small size of their base of support.
Reminds me of an old boy’s comic story I read many, many moons ago. Set in the old Frontier West and centered around a U.S cavalry officer, IIRC. His squad finds themselves with a new commanding officer, who (ironically, now that I look back on it) disdains firearms, requiring those under his command to use only the cavalry saber. Well, you can imagine the end result when they went up against the first band of natives armed with Winchesters.
We go through mindset and physical training to stop (and potentially kill) potential muggers, rapists, home invaders and other such attackers in the Gun Community. We don’t seem to put anywhere near that kind of effort into going after the attackers that are the bigger danger to us in real life.
The niche left in place by our distraction (and in some cases, apathy) is what allows the anti-gun rights movement to survive. We’ll get the chance in 2014 to show that we’ve not forgotten what the anti-gunners are trying to do now. But do we have the plan in place? And are we prepared to use all the required tools to get those politicians out of office?
What’s priority for us? A two day tactical course next Summer, or helping fund an opponent to replace an incumbent? Or looking for dirt to use against an anti-gunner?
We seem happy to beat the anti-gunners down to a small, vocal group. Like HIV surviving in a biological niche. We shouldn’t be happy with that. We should be striving to make gun-control, as both a politically and socially viable concept, extinct.
I might be wrong on this seeing as I hail from NJ, but I believe the principle has been established in law – it is completely legal for anyone to record THEIR OWN conversations with others.
Test the corollary statement in opposite, if you think this is wrong…i.e., “It is illegal to record your own conversations with other people.” That just doesn’t pass any rational test.
You are wrong. In multiple states it’s illegal to record a conversation without informing the other person. I don’t know off the top of my head, but wouldn’t be surprised if PA is one of them. MD is. You can secretly record conversations in VA, but better be sure that the other person is also in VA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws – take with a grain of salt; but it does have a list of the states that require notification. It’s a small list, but PA is one of them.
This (among others) is why the ACLU-NJ has their disclaimer about checking local laws on their POlice Tape app.
I don’t know if this has changed in recent years, but I was told a couple decades ago by my attorney at the time that recording a conversation was legal, but using it as evidence ‘directly’ in a court was not. Altho the tape could be played back in court to ‘refresh your memory of the events that you are testifying to” even thought the recording it’s self would not be evidence.
But the Jury would still hear the tape, so what’s the real difference?
Not a lawyer, but I suspect that branches into Hearsay. I suspect it’s something like (barring unusual circumstances) the tape is not itself evidence of anything, but the witness can say “yes, that recording is a true and accurate depiction of the event.” The last trial I was jury on, there was the most incredible snarl concerning the transcript of some non-English testimony; with the whole thing apparently being retranscribed and retranslated, then enough copies printed for the jury box of 14, and the judge instructing the jurors who spoke Spanish that they had to accept the translations done by the court translators and the reprinted translation as the “true” evidence, and not to use either our own translation or that of the police officers in their recorded sessions. I’m not terrifically fluent in Spanish, but I noted a degree of discrepancy between the original police translation and the transcript, and I might have used slightly different language than the in-court translators did for what I did catch. In the end it didn’t matter, but it was an eye-opening experience.
We need to take this Andromeda Strain viral. No let up. Link him solidly to MAIG. And continue to beat that drum.
What do you mean “link him solidly to MAIG”? How much more solid do you want the evidence than what I linked? I mean that’s an advertisement paid for and published by the Mayors Against Illegal Guns Action Fund that lists him as a member with his full name and city. If you think more must be done to link these mayors to MAIG, then spill with your ideas.
You’re missing the point. You know he is. I know he is. But *everyone* must know he is. We should be pushing to define the universal perception of him as criminal and of MAIG as associated with that.
Is there a post tag for Criminal MAIG Members? This seems to come up every so often.
I just turned it into a meme.
http://armaborealis.blogspot.com/2013/03/profiles-in-political-courage-mayor.html
I think I shall start releasing a series of these.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.
Chris from AK, your meme is funny but the last underlined part has a typo, it reads “Why Mayors do want..” it should read “Why do Mayors want”. Just thought I’d let you know
Fixed. Thanks!
That’s cute. I’m actually thinking of taking the advice from this thread and making a category just for the Illegal Mayors Club so that there is plenty of material available.
So, how big is this list now? What percentage of MAIG is arrested and convicted felons?
Zero; their membership is retroactively terminated.
Not if we have anything to say about it :)
Look up the criminal past of member mayor of Reading, Pa – Vaughn Spencer. Mr Spencer is a prohibited person based on his aggravated assault conviction.
Nice :)
Former Mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick is now in Milan, MI Federal prison. He was a proud member of MAIG.
They had his name scrubbed on Friday when the first story came out.
Is there a master list of illegal mayors somewhere? Seems like we’re up to quite a few at this point.
The odds of a MAIG member being a criminal is probably higher than the odds for a normal citizen. The ATF should add “are you a member of MAIG?” to the background check and use the question to disqualify individuals who answer “Yes”. ;)
Duh — the people who want to disarm you want to do so because they intend to do something that you might resist with force.
Every member of MAIG fantasizes of using force — a few of them act on their fantasies, get caught, and MAIG retcons them out of their ranks. First rule of “Totalitarian Club” — don’t talk about Totalitarian Club.
What is that dudes party? I thought the media was playing the typical game of hiding a political douchebags Democratic party affiliation, so I went searching to find out. Well wasn’t I surprised, turns out he is a Republican.
http://www.delcotimes.com/articles/2012/10/08/news/doc50730da9f39d2507487836.txt
Fair is fair. You know I would have posted the information if he was a Democrat.
And I still believe the Democratic Party is not only the party of Mayors who are criminals, but also the home party of most criminals who have a party registration. After all, guns don’t kill people – Democrats kill people!
I don’t really care about political party when it comes to MAIG. If they have joined MAIG and lobbied for anti-gun legislation, the party after their name doesn’t make a difference.
The only time I have focused on party of a MAIG mayor was one who was running for higher office and we backed a candidate to knock him out of the race in the primary. It was successful, so that’s a win.
Of course, anti-gun is anti-gun regardless of political party. But I bet the vast majority of MAIG are Democrats, if for no other reason than most mayors are Democrats (AFAIK).
The fact is gun-control is now more than ever a hyper-partisan issue. And it is important that the anti-gun hypocrites of the Democratic party suffer the consequences for their hypocrisy.
Crime and party affiliation aren’t exactly partisan, the long arm stretches across the aisle remarkably equal, based on a casual scan of the past couple decades.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_federal_politicians_convicted_of_crimes
True enough; however, presstitutes generally report party affiliations as “Republican” and “umm, you don’t need to know that”.
The acme of liberalism: Guns for me but not for thee. Laws for thee but not for me.