This is becoming a weekend pasttime, it seems. This time a cabbie interveined with a tire iron and the miscreants fled. They were caught, and are being charged as juveniles. I’m calling BS on that. If they are old enough to beat people, they are old enough to be tried as adults.
But yeah, what kind of paranoid freak would carry a gun in that city?
We’ve covered for months the fact that Philadelphia is cooking the books when it comes to reporting murders in the city. Even when murders are up over last year, they keep their little green downward pointing arrow posted.
Those are the current numbers. In the first 23 days of the year, Philly has had 27 murders. That’s 1.17 murders per day so far. But their little PR people want you to believe that crime is on the decline and everything is just fine as long as that little green arrow points down. Move along and don’t ask questions, sheeple.
Thirdpower has a picture of the Vietnam Veteran who was beat within an inch of his life in Philly (Warning, the picture is graphic). The question for those in the City is whether you want to end up like this, or end up flushing your life savings down the toilet fighting the attempted murder charge that’s sure to come from City prosecutors if you use deadly force on a gang of feral teenagers. I should also note some recent news that Gerald Ung is now facing a civil suit from his attacker. Castle Doctrine should prevent this, but since this attack happened before that law went into effect, I’m not sure that can be grounds for dismissing the suit. Ung’s attacker is also suing some of the bars that served them alcohol, including Eulogy Belgian Tavern, one of my favorite haunts in the City.
The real solution is to avoid Philadelphia. You get your life ruined either way; the only question is whether or not you want to walk away with all your brain cells intact, and without the need to seek major surgery. Unfortunately, we live in a society where no one is responsible for their own actions anymore, and we can hardly tolerate consequences for thuggish behavior if it involves good people defending themselves.
UPDATE: From the article at “Above the Law”:
Good luck getting punitive damages — or any damages at all, for that matter — out of Gerald Ung. As noted above by one of our sources, Ung is presumably judgment proof. His criminal defense lawyer at trial, renowned defense attorney Jack McMahon, won a nice acquittal for him — but it probably cost Ung a pretty penny. As we wrote at the time of the acquittal, “the services of Jack McMahon don’t come cheap. The Ungs easily owe McMahon six figures.”
Ung’s prize for his successful self-defense will be debt up to his eyeballs to Jack McMahon for, quite likely, the rest of his life. I do hope Ung is good at law and becomes a successful attorney. He may have a chance at paying off his debt quickly. For some poor Joe Sixpack who drives a truck for a living, what do you think his options are?
This time a 64 year old man a gang just decided to beat for sport. Remember, this is the same city that decided to prosecute Gerald Ung for putting six bullets into the alpha male of an attacking gang. City officials are harder on defenders than on attacking criminals. This is getting so bad, it’s irresponsible of city officials for not encouraging people to get permits and arm themselves. Hell, if I were Nutter, I’d tell the Philadelphia police to set up a firearms training course to help citizens into LTCs. But I’ll eat my hat if I ever see that day.
A fatal beating of a Temple student in Old City. Old City used to be relatively safe, even at night. But Nutterville is looking progressively more like an asylum run by the inmates. It is extremely unwise to venture into Philadelphia, anywhere in Philadelphia, unarmed.
Three teens are dead in Philadelphia (17 homicides in the first 12 days of 2012), and Mayor Michael Nutter is making headlines for strong words against the parents. He ranted that late on a Tuesday night, kids should have been in bed, getting ready for bed, or doing homework. They shouldn’t be driving around looking for fights and other trouble. A little shocked by his rant? Well, you won’t be shocked to know that the next thing he blamed was the lack of gun laws. But, that’s not actually the problem with why the shooter was on the streets:
Meanwhile, Eyewitness News has learned the suspect in the shooting, Axel Barreto, has a lengthy criminal record, including at least seven arrests since 2000, mostly for drugs. But on Saint Patrick’s Day 2004, court records show Barreto was arrested for illegally possessing a gun, but those weapons charges didn’t stick. …They found him in possession of marijuana but also with a gun, which was illegal because he was already a convicted felon according to Tasha Jamerson, a spokeswoman for District Attorney Seth Williams.
Barreto was charged with five gun-related crimes, including trying to scrape off the serial number on the gun, but the charges were dropped six months later. His defense attorney at the time, Anthony Stefanski, says the judge ruled that police illegally searched Barreto that day without cause, so prosecutors were left with no evidence and little choice but to drop the charges. (emphasis added)
This guy committed at least five gun-related crimes in one incident. That’s not an indication of too few laws on the books. The reason this guy is on the street isn’t because the charges were too light, it’s because the police didn’t follow the law. There’s no gun law that will help Philadelphia if they conduct illegal searches so that all of the evidence of the search has to be thrown out in court. Hell, even an outright ban on possession by any civilian under any circumstance wouldn’t have put this guy behind bars since they found the gun in an illegal search.
As the Philadelphia Daily News was headed to print with the headline “Kill-adelphia: Yet again, city tops list of homicide rates,” they missed another homicide for their report. As I told Wyatt in response to that tweet, the city’s leaders think he’s using fuzzy math for considering year-over-year numbers. They only count from the very highest number and consider all numbers below it to be an improvement. Even as murder is on the rise, they use a “method” of counting that considers it down by double digits. The problem is that no one believes them, but the city voters aren’t willing to hold anyone accountable.
But John Coleman, shopping at the Uceta market yesterday, wasn’t buying the spin.“They lyin’,” said Coleman, 25.
They use every excuse under the sun. You can’t track trends with year-over-year data. (Really? Yet, using the absolute worst year is a method for tracking long-term trends?) The city’s leadership says that the numbers aren’t accurate because they actually include every homicide, and they don’t think all of them count. Which ones don’t count?
“We’ve been pretty much flat for about two years, if you take the Gosnell numbers out,” said Everett Gillison, deputy mayor for public safety, who spoke for the Nutter administration.
What are “the Gosnell numbers” that shouldn’t count? That would be the doctor who murdered seven babies & one woman.
Of course, even though shootings are down, the lack of extreme gun control in the rest of the state is to blame, according to the head of the Philadelphia Police Department. The mayor’s spokesman says that the economy is to blame, as does a social worker interviewed in the article. It’s easier to blame everyone else for a city that chooses to do nothing to stop the culture of violence.
Promises are made by the city’s current leaders, but no one cares enough to hold them accountable.
Mayor Nutter, at a debate during his 2007 campaign, pledged that he wouldn’t seek re-election if the 2010 homicide tally was more than the 288 killed in 2002. Then at his inauguration in January 2008, he set what turned out to be an overly ambitious goal of slashing the city’s murder rate by 30 to 50 percent in three to five years. He won re-election this year.
He didn’t meet a single one of those promises, but there was never any doubt as to his chances to hold office this year. I think it speaks volumes that in the picture for the article that only two people in the crowd look upset at the body covered just a few feet from them. I think far too many residents in that city have simply decided to accept this level of crime as a way of life.
I could fisk this editorial from the Philly Inquirer about the evils of concealed carry reciprocity. But most of you have heard those arguments before. Instead, I’ll just highlight a relevant point compared with some other news from today.
The NRA and its acolytes in Congress argue that this measure simply brings a degree of uniformity to concealed-carry permits in much the same way as one state honors another’s drivers’ licenses.But the stakes are much higher, since making the right determination about who should – and should not – carry a gun is a potential matter of life and death to a degree unmatched by rules about who gets to slide behind the wheel of a vehicle.
Follow that with a report from the front lines in Philly about their crime problems:
With last night’s vehicular homicide, the kill tally in #Philly is now 302.
I look forward to tomorrow’s editorial calling for the end to the “49 state loophole” that allows drivers from other states to come into Pennsylvania with their tools of death (aka cars) that are too dangerous for Philadelphia’s streets.
A blogger colleague who works in the Comcast Center, the tallest building in Philadelphia, has some pics of the Occupy Philly protest trying to occupy the Comcast Center. What I really want to know is who the dude is walking that beam? And what is he accomplishing by being there? How did he get up there? It’s odd that in a picture of occupiers, I’m really floored by the guy with the high wire act.
The best part that Dave notes, “Oh, by the way, I asked my coworker and he said they smelled pretty bad.” Looks like mostly they will be occupying City Hall, which I’m pretty sure probably smells bad enough from the rats that infest that building on any given day. I doubt anyone will notice. But the Comcast Center is private property, and security appears to have acted quickly.
UPDATE: Apparently the high wire act is a statue. I guess that’s why it’s not moving.
From What Starts with W. For those of you who might not remember, this is the case of the guy made to eat pavement for OCing a pistol down the streets of Philadelphia while in possession of a valid License to Carry. You can see the YouTube video that started it all here.
Apparently the verdict is not guilty. He was charged with reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct. I sincerely hope this helps his Civil Rights lawsuit.
