A routine traffic stop for a noise violation led to the arrest of a sus pected drug dealer who had a loaded AK-47 assault rifle on the back seat of his car, Jersey City police said.
How could that be? They are illegal in New Jersey. Long ago, Jim Florio rid New Jersey of AK-47s once and for all. Of course, this isn’t news, except then they say this:
A search of the vehicle turned up the loaded assault rifle as well as 52 rounds of .22-caliber ammuni tion and a bag of cocaine, police reports said.
An AK-47 doesn’t take anything close to .22 caliber ammunition. Or wasn’t an assault rifle? Maybe it was a tube fed .22 that holds more than 15 rounds? Who knows. This is the media. The details don’t matter. Neither does getting the facts straight.
UPDATE: Here’s more details from The Jersey Journal:
Sternes was taken out of the car without incident, and then a search of the vehicle turned up the loaded assault rifle as well as 52 rounds of .22 caliber ammunition and a bag of cocaine, reports said.
Further investigation turned up a .22 caliber revolver stashed behind a garbage bin at the Holland Gardens public housing complex. Police believe it was a “community gun” used by Sternes and others to commit street crimes, and are trying to determine if the weapon is linked to criminal activity, reports said.
Sternes spent three years in prison after a 2002 conviction on drug charges, state Department of Corrections records show.
“This incident not only underscores the reality that routine police stops rarely are just routine any longer, but the availability of dangerous weapons has reached epidemic proportions,” Mayor Jerramiah Healy said in a statement. “I mean, an AK-47 on the streets, it’s ridiculous.”
Epidemic proportions? But… but… but… they are illegal. Either way, I doubt that it’s anything close to an epidemic. If a routine seizure is enough to make the news, that would seem to indicate that finding assault weapons in a traffic stop is rare. Had it been a pistol, no one would care. That kind of thing happens all the time.
Maybe it was actually an AK-74 with 5.45×39 ammo.
Or an AK-clone that takes .223.
So, does that mean that he actually managed to have _both_ a loaded AK-47 _and_ .22 ammo in the car??? OMG I thought that the two would be completely incompatible to transport together.
Who knows what will happens next, perhaps people will have ammo in the car and no gun.
I don’t generally travel with ammunition in a caliber that doesn’t fit into a gun I would also have with me. It seems that he had a 22 cal pistol stashed somewhere, which explains why he had the ammo for it.