In another overuse of SWAT team incident, in Milwaukee they use one to take down a squirrel shooter. They wouldn’t comment on the type of gun used, but did find three dead squirrels in the yard as evidence. My money is on the gun in question being an air gun, or you can bet the police would have mentioned it. The people of Milwaukee can sleep safely tonight, or at least the squirrels can.
15 thoughts on “Drop the Squirrel! Drop it Now!”
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You laugh, but growing up in Jersey I walked out of the woods from shooting squirrels with a Crossman pump gun to a half dozen cops with guns trained on me and my friends and was threatened with arrest for illegal possession of a firearm.
And yes, in Jersey a BB gun is a firearm (I had a hunting license but not a firearm owners ID card as it was 2 weeks after my 18th birthday and the FOID usually took about 6 months to get)
I *think*, based on both my reading of the law and the discussion going on in the Switcheroo thread, that you would have been OK; falling into the hunting exemption for possession. Wouldn’t have wanted to be in your shoes, though. Which is why there are some days I wonder why I bothered. (Then I go to the range and am reminded).
Some things are just so unbelievable my eyes can’t focus due to the stupidity of the words on the paper.
Squirrels are rats that climb trees.
Some PETA paying neighbors in that area!
Ian,
They confiscated the gun and had me basically arrested in the back seat of the car – my friends who were all still 17 weren’t arrested (but had their guns taken too) – until the called my name into the police station and the chief of police happened to be in the office and came back on the radio that they couldn’t arrest me, that my mom played tennis with his wife every week, and he’d never hear the end of it.
So they let me go. Thank god for small town favors.
Oh, I can well believe that. Which is why I’m hypercautious about transport. I *don’t* have favors to call in with the local PD, much less any staties if I happen to be on the turnpike or parkway (*$*%$% lack of open-membership ranges in this state).
I had overheard a couple of guys talking about a similar situation that happened to one of their kids when I was in the diner the other day – they were shocked that BB guns were considered firearms.
Praying every night for incorporation and Alan Gura’s team to hit NJ the day after.
Folks in other states just can’t believe it, but in NJ an air gun IS a “firearm”. Part of the statutory definition IIRC is something close to “…a device that expels a projectile by the force of expanding gas or air…” I guess even a peashooter is a “firearm” in NJ, since it expels a projectile by force of expanding air. What a state. I can’t wait to leave.
Enh – I’m not at that point yet. In fact, doubled down by buying a house here. Shame about the government and corruption; which leads to a truly evil amount of regulation and taxes. And it’s not like I’m a native either – I’ve lived (a lot of) elsewhere.
There are some nice places to live in NJ, and they’re not too overpriced (yet). We’ll see what happens in a year or two, though. Either the state will implode or rthey’ll chase everyone not on the state payroll out AND THEN implode…
Anybody read the article? “…51 year old man gunned down three squirrells…”.
Gunned down? Really? Those are the words you choose for someone exterminating tree rats?
OK – that’s a tad hyperbolic…
I grew up wanting to leave the state. I did as soon as I graduated high school.
My parents – who grew up in NY – always thought of the state as the promised land. An opportunity to escape the horros of NY (my dad grew up in the Bronx). They still live there – have a gorgeous house and a fair bit of land in Morris County – but I don’t like returning.
Its a gorgeous state – especially where I grew up. And I generally love the small community feel it has (the comunism aside, I tend to think the extreme local town control that exists in Jersey and Pennsylvania and all of New England is far preferrable to the crap county based government we have in Virginia).
You are a shill of the NRA. That unlicensed, unregistered BB gun had a Beta C-Mag 100-round drum, a silencer, a muzzle brake, a flash hider, a telescoping folding stock, a night-vision sniper scope, tritium-coated BUIS, a barrel less than 16″, a total length of under 30″, full-auto and burst settings, a bayonet lug, an under-slung 37mm flare launcher with a revolving magazine, a pistol grip that hangs conspicuously underneath the action, a thumbhole stock, a threaded barrel, a barrel shroud, a 100mW laser, and a forward pistol grip with a hollow cavity, inside of which the police found a copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook, an autographed picture of Osama bin Laden, the 4th season DVD box set of South Park, a necklace of squirrel ears, and a piece of the Shroud of Turin that the suspect had urinated on.
Oh, can’t wait to hear my MPD family members explain how this was somehow required for officer safety.
As much as I try, I just can’t stop loathing LEOs.
See – I actually liked the county-level government and find that the town-level government leads to needless duplication of services (and expenses). I don’t want to abolish the towns, so much as make them share certain services (school districts come to mind – there are more school districts than town governments).
Grew up in Fairfax Co. Admittedly did not go to public school for most of my education. But
Ian,
the local control of the schools is exactly what I want. The school I graduated from was the top high school in NJ. It was public and we had 100% graduation rates and 100% college acceptance rates and the highest averaged SAT scores in the state.
Had it been a regional county level magnate school – that wouldn’t have happened and it would have fallen disasterously.
I live in Fairfax, in McLean, now. Between McLean High and Langley we also have probably the two best public high schools in the state – and they are both county schools. But this is an anomoly in Virginia. Anywhere else, they’d be seriously lacking.
And as it is the curriculum is controlled by people averaging things out over the entire county – apeasing the needs of Springfield as well as McLean. Thats not the case in Jersey. If you want it, you can decide to move to the town that suits you just perfect.
I grew up in Burke; and when I was high-school age Fairfax Co public schools were top-5 nationally ranked. And last I checked (which was a while back) Thomas Jefferson was considered to be an excellent magnet school and again, natioanlly ranked. Graduation rates are more of an indicator of parental involvement than anything else.
My wife went to a magnet program at Marlboro high, part of the Freehold Regional School district (which includes some 6 different towns, most of Monmouth County at this point). You need a certain size body of students to fill the seats in a magnet school.
The county-level government system has its faults, but lack of magnet schools and 100% graduation and college attendance rates aren’t one of them.
Small towns in Jersey means I pay something like 3-5 times the property tax on a older, smaller house on less land than my father does on his house in Burke (not to mention my brother’s 3 acres in Manassas). Becasue they have to pay competitive rates for the administrators in the police and school systems, etc; and can’t take advantage of economies of scale in those systems. Not to mention the fracturing of tax base – I almost bought a nicer house in the next town over, but the property taxes were 50% higher than what I’m paying now because that town has next-to-no commercial or industrial taxpayers at all; it’s almost all residential and a few (generally boarded-up) storefronts. *And* it’s got an gang problem in the schools. Nice-looking town, really convenient for my commute (more convenient in some ways than the house I ended up buying). But what commercial taxbase it had was killed when the local big-box stores went into the malls in another town. So they soak the homeowners even more. And despite the ginormous tax burden, somehow the roads are better kept up whenever I go down to visit my family in NoVA. And I’d stack up the Fairfax County park system against ANY of the NJ County park systems.
New Jersey government is rotten from the state down to the towns; that’s a big part of the problem. But the more government you have, the more chances for corruption, the more government jobs you have to pay for, and the smaller the governmental organization, the easier for a clique to control it. NJ has MORE SCHOOL DISTRICTS THAN TOWNS. And each one of those school districts has it’s own share of feather-bedding administrators, assistant administrators, vice-administrators, etc. Likewise, how many chiefs of police does NJ need? (Not every town has one, some of the smaller or more rural ones essentially contract out to the State Police).
I think a middle ground between NJ and VA can exist. NJ *does* have some county-level governance; after all. And it does provide some services, the level of which depends on the county.