2007 – Page 128 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Something’s Wrong With This Picture

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?Â But… but… but… they are illegal.Â Either way, I doubt that it’s anything close to an epidemic.Â 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.Â Had it been a pistol, no one would care.Â That kind of thing happens all the time.

More Ammo Supply?

Looks like General Dynamics just won a $44 million dollar small arms ammunition contract.Â I’m hoping this means they will be able to add production capacity, and can help keep the price of 5.56x45mm NATO down to a reasonable level.Â Lately, I’m trying not to shoot so much of it because of the price, and I hate that.

Trucking Industry Against I-80 Tolls

I’m glad to see the trucking industry coming out against the tolls.Â It’s a stupid idea, and to add to the stupidity, they are studying the possibility of doing the same thing to I-95.

Currently, to see Bitter, in Virginia, I pay the 3-dollar tolls in Delaware, both ways (actually, I’ve been bypassing them now, it’s easy, actually), a 5 dollar toll one way in Maryland, and a 2 dollar toll both ways for the Fort McHenry Tunnel.Â Grand total is 15 dollars in tolls.Â That’s, of course, in addition to the $600 a year I fork over to the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission just on my daily commute.

Pennsylvania ought to be ripping up toll booths, not looking for excuses to build new ones.Â I’d be a very bad anarcho-capitalist, but I’ve always believed that tax money is well spent on public roads.Â Everyone benefits, even people who don’t drive.Â It ought to be a collectively borne cost.Â There are some narrow instances where I think tolls make sense, but otherwise it’s too easy for state governments who are bad at managing cash to raise money through tolls as a back door method for taxation.

It’s not just Pennsylvania. Â Delaware is talking about raising it’s 21 mile section of I95 to 4 dollars both ways, up from 3 dollars.Â I’ve also heard they are considering putting a toll plaza on the 896 offramp to discourage people from shirking the toll on the back roads like I’ve been doing.Â That’s 8 dollars to go through Delaware and back!Â At some point I think the federal government needs to step in and tell the states enough. Â The feds are eager to use their power to regulate interstate commerce for stupid crap that’s neither interstate nor commerce, they can damn well use it for what it was meant for!

New Firewall

I put a new firewall/wireless router on my home network.Â Â The default Verizon ActionTEC has flaky wireless, so I switched to a Netgear box.Â The firewall features on the Netgear box aren’t quite as good, but it’ll do for now.Â At some point, I might play with OpenWrt on a Linksys WRT.Â Â Linksys WRTs by default kind of suck, because they like to time out TCP connections while you’re using them, and there’s no way to disable this “feature”, but if I can run a Linux based firewall/wireless router on one, I’d have total control, and it would do anything I wanted it to.

Visitors to the blog might have noticed a slight interruption in service for the ten seconds it took to switch over to the new system.Â It’s easy when it’s just a simple home network.

A Pack, Not a Herd

It’s good to see that people in Alexandria can get things done, even when the police take almost 15 minutes to show up:

Hart caught him in a bear hug three blocks away about the time that O’Brien, who had run back to her house for handcuffs and was still barefoot, drove up in Boyd’s truck. They handcuffed Dean just as Alexandria patrol cars pulled up. Dispatchers registered Thorp’s 911 call at 5:22 a.m. Police were on scene at 5:35 a.m., Alexandria police officials said.

Babin’s children slept through the ordeal.

In the ensuing months, Dean has tried to call Babin collect from jail four times. Hart said there is a palpable sense of relief in the neighborhood now that he is no longer hanging around. And O’Brien’s son has a much clearer sense of what she means when she says, “Mommy catches bad guys.”

O’Brien, Hart and Boyd were honored for their actions recently by the Alexandria police. But they played down their roles. O’Brien said she is trained to deal with crime. And helping each other out is simply what neighbors do, they said.

O’Brien is a fed, but it’s a good deal when the neighborhood has a guy in custody before the police even get there.Â A good lesson in this is not to leave your cell phone uncharged or out of reach.

How to Spot a Hidden Handgun

Conservative Scalawag links to a guide written for the NYPD on [how to spot a concealed pistol]*.Â Â Take a look.Â I have to admit, about keeping the hand close to the shirt, and not swinging the other arm, I do that.Â I have to keep the shirt from blowing open.Â Â I do that even when I’m not carrying, just out of habit.Â The rest of the things they mention can be solved by using a quality holster.Â Â Studies have shown that bad guys almost universally don’t carry in holsters; just stuffing it in their waistband.Â Â I don’t get this.Â Why don’t criminals use a holster?

* Dead link removed

Is Bob Casey Alive?

I have to admit, since he’s gotten elected, by being the un-Santorum, I have been wondering exactly what he’s been doing.Â Â Because if he’s doing something, I’m not exactly sure what it is.Â Â It seems I’m not alone, and now the press is starting to ask these questions.Â I anxiously await to hear whether they can determine whether he’s alive.

The Preener

John Edwards hair preening I think has to hurt him with male voters.Â Especially if he ended up running against Fred Thompson. Â Do you think Fred Thompson preens his hair?Â I think the statement would go something like this:

“As you can see, I don’t really have that much hair left to preen.Â Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go have sex with my hot wife.”

If people voted based purely on logic, that wouldn’t matter, but they don’t, and so it does.

Not Getting an iPhone

I won’t say I’ll never get an iPhone, but when it comes to Apple, I’m not an early adopter.Â Why?Â Because they stick it to you on price if you adopt early.Â Even if you’re a late adopter, they’ll charge you a pretty sizeable chunk of change.Â Plus, I kind of like my phone to be, well, a phone.Â I use my phone to make calls.Â I’m not sure I really want my phone to have a camera, play video, or play MP3s.Â Â When I want to play MP3s, I’ll use the iPod.Â If I want to take a picture, I’ll whip out my Nikon digital camera.

Now, I know there are more than a few haters out there, but I think I at least have some company in the world of Apple.Â I’m a computer professional by day, so I’ve used a lot of different types of laptops, and I can say that they pretty much all have their problems, Macs included.Â Â I still wouldn’t really use anything else, because I can’t stand using Windows for 10 minutes before I want to use whatever machine its running on as target practice.

Linux, which I used for years as a desktop, makes a great server, and reasonably good workstation, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of user interface design, and tends to borrow the best and worst features of all the other systems out there.Â Â I stopped using Linux on the desktop because every time I bought a new peripheral, I’d have to have to spend 20 minutes to figure out how to make it work with Linux.Â Â Linux will actually work with most things these days, an they are getting pretty good at the plug and play thing for common devices, but when things don’t work, you better know what you’re doing. Â On the Mac, things just work, and since I get paid to make things work by day, I don’t exactly feel like doing it when I come home at night.

I may not buy an iPhone, but I do think Apple makes genuinely good products overall.Â It’s not just marketing hype.Â Having to deal with Windows on a daily basis professionally, I wouldn’t even think of using it for my personal life.Â I was long of the opinoin that NeXTStep was one of the best operating systems ever engineered, but had the misfortune of running on underpowered and overpriced hardware.Â Apple hardware is still overpriced, but it’s worth it to me not to have to deal with the aggravation of Windows.Â I can understand why someone may not feel it’s worth the price tag; even I wince at the price of Apple’s hardware, but you can have my MacBook when you pry it from my cold dead hands ;)

Fireworks Cancelled! Blah!

Apparently the contractor who was scheduled to do the Alexandria fireworks canceled at the last minute, so they had to cancel the show.Â At least that was the rumor on King Street.Â The show was definitely canceled though, so I got to watch no fireworks this Fourth of July.Â Fortunately, I got to go to my favorite Thai restaurant in the area, Mai Thai.Â I’m a fan of their Thai Drunken Noodle with mixed seafood.Â I’ve been meaning to try their curry dishes, but so far I’m a fan of their noodle dishes.Â Back home I have a few good Thai places I like to go to, but if you’re ever in the DC area, Mai Thai is pretty good.