Coalition to Clean-Up Vacant Lots? Brady Campaign to Prevent Litter? According to a study done at the University of Pennsylvania, cleaning up vacant lots has a significant effect on people committing crimes using guns. I think it’s safe to say that, given this study, it shows cleaning up vacant lots has done more to reduce crime than anything advocates by gun control groups. So why not get on board? I mean, the goal is to reduce gun violence, right? Right!?!?
Category: Crime
Bloomberg’s Justice
Having failed to obtain the conviction of a woman who killed her husband who had threatened to kill her, they apparently decided to go after her for using her abusive husband’s gun. And Bloomberg wonders why we’re committed to dismantling New York City’s gun laws.
Double Standard on Paterno and Holder?
Town Hall has an article which speaks about the double standard of Joe Paterno being fired with Eric Holder holding onto their jobs, even though they would appear to be similarly situated, in terms of their roles in their respective scandals. I can accept the logic here, and I agree that Holder ought to be fired or step down.
But I suspect the answer is that our society is just a lot more outraged over child rape than they are about gun smuggling. To be honest, I’m fine with that being the case, and I think it’s a good indication society as a whole largely has their priorities straight. I am reluctant to compare the two as roughly equivalent criminals acts. What Paterno covered up was far more heinous than what Holder covered up, even if I think they both deserve the same ultimate treatment.
How About Telling us Where to Buy the Sandwich?
Apparently two armed men robbed a 13 year old boy of his sandwich. Yeadon police say they recovered both the gun and the sandwich. They missed a key piece of information though, which is where in Yeadon to buy a sandwich that’s worth committing armed robbery for? I’m about an hour away from there, but I’ll make the drive to try that sandwich.
The Geriatric Militia Conspiracy
The media is going to have a field day with this, if only because it’ll be useful for drawing attention away from Fast and Furious and discrediting one of its sources. The Affidavit submitted for the search warrant can be found here. Their geriatric plot seemed to revolve mostly around the use of ricin, claymore mines, and silenced weapons. Our group of grandpas here seems to want to use shaped charges too, because presumably they’ve read about it somewhere, though perhaps they can’t quite remember much about it. The affidavit outlines a story of hilarious incompetence, which made it very easy for the FBI to build a case against them. Just from the affidavit, it already looks like a pretty solid case.
On May 24, 2011, THOMAS and CHS1 drove to Atlanta in THOMAS’s 2006 Red GMC Canyon Pickup Truck, license plate Georgia BMB 0821. CHS1 consensually recorded the trip. THOMAS and CHS1 planned and conducted surveillance on the ATF (2600 Century Parkway, Atlanta, Georgia 30345) and the IRS (401 West Peachtree Street NW, Atlanta, Georgia 30308) buildings to plan and assess for possible attacks.
There’s an awful lot of consensual recording going on here. But I guess you have to have something to share with the grandkids at Christmas. Or perhaps at their age, it helps to remember what the conspiracy was about, and who it was against. Either way, this is generally enough to nail someone on conspiracy. You can actually sit around and talk about the geriatric rebellion all you want, but as soon as you take some action to further your conspiracy, you’re committing a crime. If you have two confidential informants following you around with recording equipment, it’s typically not going to be hard to gather enough evidence to send you to prison for the rest of your short lives. What’s surprising is how much of their action reads not like the action of grown men, who should at their age have some aged wisdom, but rather reads like 13 year old Quasimodos plotting to attack their local Jr. High to get back at the cool kids. I will share with you some of this quite humorous, though demented and incompetent, plot:
“We’d have to blow the whole building like Timothy McVeigh. If we we’re gonna blow the buildings I would be smart to hit ’em both at the same time. Plant the explosive right up against the wall, a shaped charge. We can do it. Okay let’s do it then. We can so do our own homework on making from scratch mortars what the hell’s that, claymores and grenades. We’ve gotta have a lot of explosives.”
Pretty sure McVeigh just used truck filled with a few barrels of diesel fuel and fertilizer, along with some blasting agents. I guess they didn’t do their homework. Either way, grandpa’s walker could probably be converted into a wicked fragmentation grenade.
“Yea, uh, claymore mines, we can make these things, but I’d rather have store bought, a real one.”
Yeah… the mines Home Depot sells are a hell of a lot more reliable than the grow-it-yourself types. You could always pick one up at Lowes, which is better laid out, and keeps the anti-personnel weapons in a more logical aisle, but Home Depot has a better selection.
“We need to place within an ATF or DEA big black van. When they fill up their people, we’re gonna take ’em all out at once.”
If they get into a white van, the plan is off!
THOMAS expressed interest in obtaining weapons and equipment for the “covert group” from the UCE. THOMAS stated that he and the other members of the group have begun physical training and fitness to prepare for the physical demands that their plans may require.
My recommendation is this, for physical training.
“Helluva’n effect for so small a package! Interested? You bet!!! Show this to Cobra (ROBERTS) and then we’ll work out what we might be able to swap for some. Thanks!”
It’s not a conspiracy if you all don’t have cool code names. For the record, he’s talking about explosive packages here, though possibly he’s heard that line from his wife before.
On August 1, 2011, CHS1 consensually recorded a meeting with THOMAS, ROBERTS and another individual in northeast Georgia. They talked about acquiring TNT and building their own explosive devices. They discussed various types of detonators, but seemed to focus primarily on using pre-paid cell phones
The pre-paid models are the only ones that come with the detonators built in.
The affidavit notes some problems with the informants (one is under indictment), but given they have audio recordings, it looks like a pretty open and shut case of probable cause to get a valid warrant. No matter how ridiculous these guys might be, if you make a list of federal sonsabitches you want to take out, and then take action to further your plot, even if the FBI is there every step of the way providing you with everything you need to incriminate yourselves, you’re going to end up in prison. After reading the affidavit, I have no problem with what the FBI did here, and I’m going to guess after execution of the warrant, they are looking at a pretty solid case. We should probably be thankful these guys were laughably incompetent.
Mayors Against Illegal Guns’ Misdirected Mission
Looks like Mayor Bloomberg should be spending his energy looking at his own police department rather than spending his energy preventing the law-abiding from exercising their rights in his city:
The charges allege that the officers — five are still on the force and three are retired — were involved in illegally transporting more than a dozen handguns as well as M-16 assault rifles and shotguns and a variety of stolen property, the people briefed on the case said.
Even though this is a case of actual illegal guns being trafficked into New York City, I’m not going to hold my breath that we’ll hear anything about it from MAIG or Mayor Bloomberg. It does go to show if you make the market lucrative enough, people will enter it and meet the demand.
The arrests on Tuesday were based on charges that include conspiracy to transport firearms across state lines, conspiracy to transport defaced firearms across state lines, conspiracy to sell firearms across state lines and conspiracy to transport and receive stolen property across state lines, one of the people said. The stolen property included slot machines, the person said.
And here I’ve been hearing from the gun control groups that gun trafficking was legal, and that we didn’t have the proper tools to fight it. So clearly we need a federal trafficking law. Funny that when guns fall under the FBI’s purview, they don’t seem to have any problem finding charges to bring.
“Florida Loophole” in the Press
This time in St. Louis, but still using Philly as an example. We’ve documented previously that these articles have been popping up all over. The purpose of this article is to help defeat HR822, it would seem. It’s worth noting that HR822 does not extend to residents in their home states, so both before and after HR822, this Florida issue is still completely a matter of state prerogatives.
The city argues that it needs latitude in determining who is a threat, because of long-standing problems in the court system. A Philadelphia Inquirer report last year noted that while prosecutors in other big cities win felony convictions in half of violent-crime cases, in Philadelphia, prosecutors had been winning only 20 percent.
It seems to me that this is the real problem to fix. You can’t have a revolving door justice system and expect to turn your city as a whole into a kind of low-level prison, where we all have to deal with more restrictive laws because the City can’t serve basic functions such as controlling crime. It is also absolutely inappropriate to consider arrests, rather than convictions, in determining who is permitted to exercise a constitutional right.
Careful Picking up Spent Brass in Texas Without Permission
Looks like the legislature, likely trying to deter theft of metals from infrastructure, inadvertently made it a felony to pick up brass from a range that isn’t yours. Seems to me it would be possible to make a statute to apply to theft of metal necessary for the operation of public works, that would cover most conceivable situations.
Quite a Refutation
Dave Hardy notes the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics on murder rates. It’s interesting that the states with the strictest gun laws are the ones experiences the sharpest spikes in the murder rates. Kind of puts a crimp in our opponents hysterics theories.
IHOP Killer’s AK Chinese Made
The supply of Norinco’s on the open market hasn’t been plentiful for almost 20 years, so it’s surprising MSNBC is reporting on the tracing efforts, suggesting that the gun is a Norinco AK. Since it’s traced to a dealer that’s out of business, it obviously wasn’t smuggled in. Dealers are required to send their 4473 records and their A&D records to ATF when they go out of business, so the gun should be traceable, ultimately. But if it’s a Norinco, I’d say a strong possibility it’s a black market gun just based on how long ago it would have been sold. I doubt a Norinco in the hands of a collector is going to be let go of easily, since they are rare these days. They can still be had for 500-600 bucks on the legal market, but it’s been a while since I saw one at a gun show, or in a gun shop.
Picking on MSNBC a bit, it’s not true the federal assault weapons ban ever affected Norinco AKs. They were all imported before the ban went into effect, and were therefore grandfathered under the federal assault weapons ban. Norinco AKs were actually banned in 1993, rather than 1994. It is a mistake to suggest the federal AWB had anything to do with these rifles.