Teen sought in gun burglary
"Police are seeking an 18-year-old suspect wanted for stealing an AK-47 assault rifle and ammunition Thursday from a home safe in the Old Brooklyn neighborhood. Police are looking for Jason Gallardo of Cleveland, whom they believe has four stolen guns, including the AK-47."
(iverglas) Now what would they want that for? Everybody knows it's useless.
So, burglars where you're from never steal jewelry, DVD players, coins, or other valuable items from homes? You can't use a $500 gold necklace as a street weapon, either (well, unless you're Kirsten Prout in
Elektra), but that wouldn't stop most burglars from stealing one.
I saw on the local news here last year that some thieves broke into a house and stole some African-big-game hunting rifles. Doesn't mean that Holland and Holland double rifles are the new "weapon of choice of criminals," though...
OCALA, FL -- The teenager accused killing two Gainesville college students in the Ocala National Forest tried to get the stolen gun back to its owner after the shootings.
Leo Boatman, 19, has been charged in the two Jan. 3 murders.
Investigators say Boatman took the AK-47 he and his uncle were holding for a friend, Lucas Merryfield, into the woods on the same day students Amber Marie Peck and John Parker went camping.
The teen's uncle, Victor Boatman, told detectives the he didn't see his nephew or the AK-47 again until two days later. Victor Boatman told officials his nephew came back with the gun with a loaded magazine.
Merryfield picked up the gun from the pair's home the next day, the same day Leo Boatman put a .22-caliber rifle with a scope on lay-away, according to detectives.
(iverglas) Why would someone be "holding" an AK-47 for a friend?
Well, the most obvious reason would be that his friend is a student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and lives in on-campus housing where guns are prohibited. You
did notice that this occurred in Gainesville, yes?
I've personally held a gun for a semester for a friend attending college---he lived in on-campus housing and was from out of state, so he stored his Glock 9mm with my wife and I during the semester (and examining it led my wife to buy her own Glock some years later).
And I also had a trusted acquaintance hold our family's guns in his safe for us when my son had one of his heart surgeries; I think it was during our son's first heart surgery at Boston Children's in '99, when he was an infant.
And of course, we know that if the nephew had purloined a .30-30 deer rifle instead of a functionally identical non-automatic AK, the bullets would have just bounced off the victims and everyone would have been OK.
I guess Leo won't be passing that background check now. Or do outstanding murder charges without convictions not count?
I believe being under indictment for murder makes you ineligible to buy a gun (I believe it's even on the Form 4473), but I would have to look it up in the 500ish-page BATFE Federal Firearm Regulations Reference Guide to say so for sure, and I damn well have better things to do with my time that that this weekend.
A former Army Ranger accused of masterminding a bank robbery in Tacoma two years ago, and then claiming he'd done so to draw attention to war crimes he'd witnessed in Iraq, was arraigned in U.S. District Court on Friday.
... He faces a litany of charges, including armed robbery, conspiring to commit armed robbery, brandishing a firearm in relation to a violent crime and possessing a hand grenade, according to the U.S. attorney's office.
According to court documents, Sommer recruited two other U.S. Army Rangers, Chad Palmer and Alex Blum, and two Canadian nationals, Tigra Robertson and Nathan Dunmall, to participate in the August 2006 robbery of the Bank of America on South Tacoma Way.
Federal police and prosecutors allege Sommer discussed his plans at length with Byrne, recruited Blum to drive the getaway car and provided Palmer and Dunmall with loaded, fully automatic AK-47 assault rifles.
(iverglas) I guess they didn't need those AK-47s. Or maybe they were for shooting cops with after the robbery.
Hmmm, U.S. Army Ranger (1) returns from Iraq and (2) is in possession of
hand grenades and
NFA Title 2/Class III restricted automatic AK-47's, which have not been sold in the United States since 1986, and all extant pre-'86 examples are closely tracked by the BATFE.
I think the big question is, how did he smuggle them back from Iraq? Because he damn well didn't buy them here.
Of course, this citation had absolutely nothing to do with non-automatic civilian "assault weapons", but who cares, it's good spin, eh?
East Valley police departments combined resources to arrest 210 suspects, including 86 known gang members, during a three-week crackdown that ended last week.
The Gilbert, Scottsdale and Gila River police also participated in the operation, along with the Arizona Department of Public Safety and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Police also seized $10,000 in cash and about $100,000 worth of property, including two sawed-off shotguns, an AK-47 assault rifle and several semiautomatic handguns.
The police arrest TWO HUNDRED AND TEN suspects and find
ONE AK, and you take that as evidence that AK's are extremely common in criminal hands?
Maybe on Opposite Day, that would be evidence for your thesis. On any other day, not so much.
Whuh-oh. A little foreign news. Can't resist.
HALIFAX - A member of a prominent Nova Scotia family is facing charges in what the Canada Border Services Agency says is one of the most significant hauls of illegal and restricted weapons it has ever made.
A 21-year-old Halifax man, Alexander Stuart Lindsay, will be in Halifax provincial court Monday for a bail hearing. He's charged with 10 Criminal Code violations, including trafficking in weapons - ranging from submachine-guns to handguns and body armour - and with Customs Act violations. Lindsay was arrested May 14 after police raided his Halifax apartment and a storage unit. He's been in custody since his arrest pending the bail hearing.
No ammunition was found in the haul, but investigators seized high-powered Russian-made assault weapons, including a disassembled AK-47. They also found various handguns in different stages of assembly, Israeli-made Uzi submachine-guns and MAC-10 submachine-guns, body armour and armoured face masks.
(iverglas:) Well! Surely not firearms being smuggled into Canada from the US ...
Well, since
submachineguns have been as tightly controlled in the USA as in Canada since 1934, methinks either the paper got something wrong, or those guns originated outside the United States.
And FWIW, an AK-47, whether a real one or a non-automatic civilian lookalike, isn't "high powered"; it's at the low end of the rifle power spectrum, not the high end. Minor quibble.
http://www.wibc.com/News/Story.aspx?ID=91970 Man Robs Eastside Applebee's with AK-47 (Indianapolis)
5/23/2008
Metro Police are looking for a man who robbed an Applebee's with an AK-47.
Sergeant Matt Mount says it happened early Friday morning in the 7300 block of East Washington Street.
Mount says the suspect went into the restaurant as the manager was closing up for the night. Mount says the AK-47 was never fired, but it's dangerous for someone to be roaming the streets with that type of high-powered weapon.
Oh well then. He didn't fire it.
And such incidents are so rare that the choice of gun made big news. "Man robs convenience store with Jenkins pistol" would never make the headlines, because it's not out of the ordinary; the use of an AK lookalike is.
Notice to customers at the Bronx River Houses: Speed, Wod, Rad, Little Tokyo, Monkweed, Trash, Puff and the rest of the sales staff have closed up shop, courtesy of law enforcement.
All told, 23 of the full-service crack cocaine and heroin business sales clerks will not be back for awhile, authorities said, pending federal trials and likely sentences ranging up to 20 years to life.
They were all busted Wednesday after a year-long joint local and federal investigation, with a number of undercover buys.
Another individual was arrested and charged with selling an AK-47 automatic rifle to an undercover officer.
Another admirer or fine gunsmithing, obviously.
And if it was indeed an "AK-47 automatic rifle", where the hell did it come from?
And it wasn't siezed relating to a violent crime; it was a sting in which an undercover officer set up one of the criminals to find and sell him an AK (automatic or not), meaning
the choice of gun was made by the undercover police officer. Which doesn't exactly help your case.
Does (do?) the Virgin Islands count? They're, like, a US colony or something, right? I don't quite understand all that. Canada doesn't have colonies.
http://www.virginislandsdailynews.com/index.pl/article_... Thursday, May 22nd 2008
ST. CROIX - Pandemonium broke out early Wednesday morning at Luis Hospital when five gunmen forced their way into the hospital past multiple layers of security and shot a patient to death in his bed.
The violence erupted just before 4 a.m., sending nurses and patients running for cover and ending in the gangland-style execution of 28-year-old Shadrach Frett, a patient in Bureau of Corrections custody who was recovering wounds he received during a shootout last week in Catherine's Rest.
... Frett had been hospitalized after a shootout in the Catherine's Rest area May 12 that left Frett and a 25-year-old man wounded.
Police said that while investigating the shooting, they found an AK-47 assault rifle in the apartment Frett shared with Laura Trotman, 45, of Catherine's Rest.
The Virgin Islands are partly a British territory, and partly a U.S. "insular area," the legal status of which escapes me. The gun laws in the U.S. Virgin Islands are far more restrictive than those in the United States, and seem broadly similar to those in Canada (full licensure, full registration, stricter controls on weapons types, etc.).
Given the location and the local laws, I suspect that those AK's didn't originate in the United States, but rather in Central or South America, where the real thing is endemic.
A little more catch-up.
http://www.redorbit.com/news/business/1397329/arivaca_w... /
21 May 2008, 21:00 CDT
May 21--An Arivaca woman was sentenced Wednesday to three years probation for helping her sister dump a body down a mine shaft.
Stacey Leigh Sharp, Tommie Joe Holliday and Stephanie Lynn Bartlett, 41, were arrested last summer after detectives found Bobby Lee Gatlin's body in the shaft.
... Court documents indicate Bartlett was involved in an on-again, off-again relationship with Gatlin. For several years, they had been living in makeshift camps outside Arivaca with Bartlett's three teenage sons and other homeless people.
Bartlett told authorities she shot Gatlin with an AK-47 after he came after her with an ax and threatened to kill her and her children. She said she'd found the weapon in the desert.
Okay, that one was news of the weird.
Doesn't exactly help your case, though. If her story is correct, that shooting would have been ruled justified self-defense had she not panicked and decided to cover it up, BUT given her background and surroundings, I imagine she did not trust the system to get a fair trial. Not saying she was correct, just that a lot of people who have been homeless in the recent past tend to fear the police.
Neither I nor anyone else has ever said that the AK or any other small-caliber carbine isn't an EXCELLENT home-defense gun in many circumstances. If someone holding an axe kicked in
my door yelling that he was going to kill me and my children, he'd be rather likely to be catching some "AK" rounds as well.
This year LTPOA honored the Beauregard-DeRidder SWAT Team, along with Phelps Corrections Center’s SWAT Team, because of their heroic service during a dangerous seven-day mission in September 2007 in South Beauregard Parish.
During that week, the group worked together to protect Beauregard citizens from a suspect who allegedly pulled an AK-47 assault rifle on a State Trooper and ran into the woods.
While on the run, the suspect allegedly broke into homes in South Beauregard Parish, robbing homeowners of weapons. Officials also say that during attempted negotiations, the suspect threatened to kill any police officer attempting to apprehend him.
During those seven days, the SWAT team was able to keep the suspect contained within a six-mile perimeter. The team worked non-stop to maintain safety of residents, entering and securing 21 homes and buildings, and working with blood hounds to track the suspect. The officers also kept the large crowd at the nearby South Beauregard Homecoming football game safe, along with the students attending the dance the following night. The week-long pursuit ended after the suspect took his own life.
(iverglas) Noooo. Stealing guns from people? We all know that's not what happens when people have guns in their houses.
He wasn't carrying a rifle on the street. He was carrying a rifle in the
woods, where the rifle need not be concealed on the person. I have pointed out that lack of concealability is the reason rifles aren't commonly involved in street crimes of violence.
Prosecutors argued Mercedes-Castro, 24, of Poinciana, was one of three men who went to rob Derek Phillips during the early morning hours of Nov. 29, 2005. Phillips, 36, was sleeping when an AK-47 assault rifle was fired through the window of his Pilchard Drive home. He was shot just above his mouth and the bullet exploded through the back of his head.
I have never said that rifles are never used in violent crimes. I said they are the LEAST misused of firearms in violent crimes, even though a very low level of misuse does occur.
If you post another four hundred or so rifle-murder anecdotes, you might get them all. And if you post another 800 or so, you MIGHT catch up to the number of people killed with shoes and bare hands.
Fact: Rifles are the least misused of firearms in the United States in violent crimes, including but not limited to murder. Posting a few carefully selected anecdotes doesn't change that fact.
OSHTEMO TOWNSHIP -- The Kalamazoo Valley Enforcement Team found crack cocaine, powder cocaine and an AK47 assault rifle Monday during a raid of an apartment in Oshtemo Township, police said.
Two men, ages 17 and 18, who lived at the apartment, were arrested by police following the search, police said. Their names were not released.
Police said the 17-year-old was arrested on charges of possession with intent to deliver crack cocaine and felony use of a firearm. The other man was arrested on an outstanding warrant.
Sheesh. You'd almost think those drug dealers imagined they were in some sort of war ... and thought it wise to have the right tools for the job ...
Given the popularity of civilian AK's in U.S. homes, a random sampling of homes in my neighborhood would turn up several AK's. And we're not drug dealers.
Fact is, AK's belong to the least likely class of firearm to be used by drug dealers. But who cares about general facts, right? We like
anecdotes.
One percent of crimes can sound like a lot if you speak of the one percent as if it's something common. But in statistics, that's called "lying."
May 20, 2008 6:00 a.m.
Partygoer robbed by man with AK-47
A man reported being robbed outside a Weisser Park Avenue home after a party early Sunday morning.
Fort Wayne police were called about 2 p.m. Sunday on the report of the robbery. The man told officers he and a friend were held up at gunpoint after leaving a house party on Weisser Park Avenue sometime after 4 a.m. Sunday, a police report said.
The victim said while the two were leaving the home a man came from behind him holding an AK-47. The gunman told the victim and his friend to give him everything they had. Another man was with the gunman, but the victim said he did not appear to be armed, the report said.
The victims gave the robbers money and jewelry they were wearing, the report said.
One man was described to be in his 20s, 5-foot-8, thin, black, with short dreadlocks, wearing a white T-shirt, a backward black baseball cap and armed with an AK-47 with a strap, the report said.
Oh, who knows. Maybe it wasn't really an AK-47.
Hmmm, presumably inebriated guy gets robbed from behind at night, and tells police the gun was an "AK-47." Maybe, maybe not. Doesn't help your case any, unless you have a few tens of thousands of AK robberies to cite.
Okay. There's more. But that's all for you.
Then thank you for
proving my point.AK's are so rarely misused that even with the heavy Von Restorff bias toward AK mention in news coverage, this is all you can come up with.
A thousand people a month are murdered in this nation of 300 million people, and you think listing 5 deaths and a few nonviolent crimes demonstrates that the MSM's breathless "AK menace" is a fact? You know better than that.
Fact is, you seem to want very, very badly to believe that civilian AK lookalikes are a major crime problem in the United States, but they just
aren't.
2006 data: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/data/table_20.html
Total murders.............................14,990..........100.00%
Handguns...................................7,795...........52.00%
Other weapons (non firearm, non edged).....2,158...........14.40%
Edged weapons..............................1,822...........12.15%
Firearms (type unknown)....................1,465............9.77%
Hands, fists, feet, etc......................833............5.56%
Shotguns.....................................481............3.21%
Rifles.......................................436............2.91%http://www.atf.gov/firearms/ycgii/2000/generalfindings
Table 4: Top Ten Long Guns by Type and Caliber/Gauge
by Age Group of Possessor
Long Gun Type and Caliber - All Ages
Shotgun 12 GA...........6,854...............35.5%
Rifle .22...............4,076...............21.1%
Rifle 7.62mm............1,729................9.0%
Shotgun 20 GA...........1,277................6.6%
Rifle .30-30..............616................3.2%
Shotgun .410 GA...........615................3.2%
Rifle .223................599................3.1%
Rifle 9mm.................412................2.1%
Rifle .30-06..............410................2.1%
Shotgun 16 GA.............409................2.1%
Top Ten Long Guns......16,997...............88.0%
All Long Guns..........19,311..............100.0%AK's (7.62x39mm) fall into the 7.62mm category. That category also includes the SKS (most popular centerfire rifle in America), Ruger Mini Thirty, and presumably any guns chambered for the more powerful 7.62x51mm (.308 Winchester cartridge), a popular deer round that is also used in the Springfield M1A, civilian CETME's, FAL lookalikes, and some HK's. So AK's are only a part of that 9%, but that 9% is the upper bound on AK's in the YCGIS.