Man Robs Convenience Stores With Klingon "Batleth" 579
mnovotny writes "Colorado Springs police are looking for a man who hit two 7-Eleven convenience stores, armed with a Klingon 'Batleth' sword inspired by the Star Trek science fiction series.
They did appear more human in the original series."
Re:*Both* Clerks Recognized It? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:There is no honor in theft. (Score:1, Informative)
It's spelled "petaQ" and I can't believe I actually knew that.
Re:Enact the assault sword ban! (Score:2, Informative)
Not a sword, a dagger. And no, you shouldn't be allowed to carry either on an airplane. 9/11 happened because 4 guys with box-cutters could commandeer an airplane. Obviously, this tactic would not work today, but I think that Sikhs can check their daggers. Not wanting the general public carrying weapons on a plane is neither paranoid nor moronic.
Re:this geek is clearly breaking the rules... (Score:3, Informative)
No, but armed robbery will land him in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
No, it will land him in a county jail. If it were a repeat or significant enough offense, he would likely end up in a state prison. Federal prison is for thos who violate federal laws - armed robbery that doesn't cross state lines is a local/state crime.
Re:Enact the assault sword ban! (Score:5, Informative)
Louisiana allows for open carry, but the instructor (a state trooper) cautioned that all it takes is a complaint for you to get arrested for it. The reasoning is that "disturbing the peace" trumps the right to open carry.
Re:this geek is clearly breaking the rules... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Enact the assault sword ban! (Score:5, Informative)
Sometimes you'll get arrested for that in Georgia, too, but it almost always gets thrown out in court (assuming you were licensed and legal to carry in that location). Now, if you're in a private establishment, and the manager/proprietor decides he doesn't like it, that's a different matter; he has full legal right to ask you to cover up or leave.
in general, though, firearms laws in Georgia are so convoluted and ambiguous that even the judges, lawyers, and police don't really know it well. Go up and ask five officers what the laws are, you'll get six different answers. We're trying to fix that, because regardless of the subject, the people deserve laws that are clear and easy to understand. Otherwise, how can they follow them?
Re:The heroes of 911 are afraid of box cutters. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Enact the assault sword ban! (Score:2, Informative)
Pardon me, but WTF?
First, unjustified shootings by people with carry permits are extremely rare. Second, why would one passenger shooting another on board an airplane cause a crash? Planes are not fragile - and no, "explosive decompression" will not cause a plane to tear apart if it's hull is pierced by a bullet.
Re:Enact the assault sword ban! (Score:3, Informative)
Louisiana allows for open carry
IIRC, for alcohol as well as firearms. :-)
It's a *ceremonial* dagger (Score:3, Informative)
And it looks it would take a good bit of effort to "cut" a stick of butter with it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirpan [wikipedia.org]
(Also see the legality section further down)
I'd be surprised if these got a second look pre-9/11...but these days a picture of a giant cartoon robot with a cartoon gun on your T-shirt is too dangerous to take on a plane.
Re:The heroes of 911 are afraid of box cutters. (Score:2, Informative)
I thought I remembered that some of the cellphone transcripts from the hijacked planes said that the hijackers claimed to have bombs on board.
If they were telling passengers that, coupled with the fact that most hijacked planes up to that point were just flown to a unfriendly nation and held for ransom, the passengers really had no way to know that risking their lives would have saved thousands.
Re:Enact the assault sword ban! (Score:5, Informative)
Because, those passengers did something heroic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11 [wikipedia.org]
(and the actual news item sourced by Wikipedia:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,191520,00.html [foxnews.com])
They were the only ones on any of the planes (besides the hijackers themselves), who knew the plan was to crash the plane into a building.
They could have chosen to disbelieve the information ("Who is crazy enough to do that? We should just wait."), instead, they chose to make sure that the plane they were on could NOT be used in that way.
I am sure they were all hoping they would live (who doesn't?), and they knew they were going to die if they did nothing, but their actions kept the terrorists from achieving their objective.
Bluntly, they were the only ones who were in the position to do something, and they acted, even though that action cost them their lives.
In that way they became Martyrs. Bitterly ironic given that they were the only way to stop other supposed "Martyrs" plans.
Re:The heroes of 911 are afraid of box cutters. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Enact the assault sword ban! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Enact the assault sword ban! (Score:2, Informative)
Your "12 times more likely" statistic only holds water when you include suicides. When you consider that over half of all firearm-related deaths in the coutry are suicides, and that people committing suicide with a gun are generally going to use their own, it makes sense.
Second, the number of accidental firearm deaths per year is actually quite low. The number of successful defensive gun uses is much higher.
I'd also suspect that people are more likely to die in a car owned by someone in their household than in anyone else's car.
Re:Enact the assault sword ban! (Score:1, Informative)
UA93 was shot down by the Airforce, which was the right thing to do. Why people in the U.S. are still clinging to this bizarre "let's roll" pantomime is a mystery to most of the world's population.
Someone made a tough call; someone else higher up decided the public wouldn't like it, so concocted an Alamo/Iwo Jima fantasy that would sit better with the masses. Trouble is, now the fairy-story is out there, it's going to be decades before they 'fess up.
I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories, but ask yourselves which of the two scenarios seems more plausible - if you think the "let's roll" bollocks rings true, you've been watching far too many "Die Hard" movies.
Re:Enact the assault sword ban! (Score:2, Informative)
You are, of course, right. The arguments in this particular case are spurious. Who is making them?
The Brady campaign, for one. I paraphrased the "anti" argument off their "assault weapon" page. There's also that one Congresslady (whose name I forget at the moment) who referred to "the shoulder thing that goes up". I assume she means the stock that every rifle and shotgun has?
On your point about keeping criminals in prison though, isn't that the MOST expensive and distressing thing a government can do?
It depends. Keeping a prisoner is rather expensive, but some of the expense is due to the idea that hardened criminals need ice cream and cable TV. (I shit you not; one inmate filed a lawsuit because he wasn't allowed ice cream, and the court awarded him damages.) As it stands now, many criminals view prison as just a couple months interlude before they can get back on the street. Just a thing they have to go through, in other words.
I would suggest taking some hints from that sheriff in Arizona with the lowest recidivism rate in the country. No cable TV, no high-speed internet. You get three meals a day, but they'd be standardized vegetarian meals (avoiding religious issues over meats). Criminals will be occupied doing hard labor--if nothing else, making big rocks into little rocks. The idea is to keep them from conspiring/plotting/doing business behind bars, and making prison so unpleasant (not cruel torture or anything, but bad enough) that they would rather avoid crime altogether rather than risk going to prison.
I'd also suggest that the violent types (rapists, child molesters, etc.) get life without parole, and actually mean it. Two felonies, same thing. I'm still shocked by the case of the man in Atlanta who was arrested a couple months ago... he had been convicted of 26 felony charges, and had been in and out of prison multiple times... yet he was still walking the streets. He was eventually arrested for being a felon in possession of a firearm, and after his rap sheet became public, was finally put away for life.
I'm always dumb-founded on the high recidivism
See above. Prison is just a minor inconvenience to a lot of these guys.
and overall incarceration rates in this country,
Because we throw people in jail with hardened criminals for committing the horrible crime of smoking a joint or selling themselves on a street corner out of desperation. Prisons fill up with these nonviolent offenders, and displace the hardened criminals back out onto the street. Plus, the media glorifies thuggery and street violence. And I'm suspecting that a lot of people turn to gangs and street crime out of desperation; they see no better life ahead of them so they try to find some way to escape. Fixing that will take fixing communities, and I'm not quite sure how to do that.
Easy access to deadly weapons is really peripheral to the fact that so many people want to use them to commit acts of violence.
EXACTLY!
Taking away deadly weapons wouldn't change the fact that there is this element in our society, would it? I don't think so.
Precisely. We'd see a lot more "up close and personal" violence, and crime in general, and the law-abiding people would have one less thing to defend themselves with.
Re:The heroes of 911 are afraid of box cutters. (Score:3, Informative)
Except that Edward Jay Epstein is wrong when he says that no witnesses reported the hijackers having box cutters.
The 9-11 Commission Report states: "At some point between 9:16 and 9:26, Barbara Olson called her husband, Ted Olson, the solicitor general of the United States. She reported that the flight had been hijacked, and the hijackers had knives and box cutters. She further indicated that the hijackers were not aware of her phone call, and that they had put all the passengers in the back of the plane. About a minute into the conversation, the call was cut off. Solicitor General Olson tried unsuccessfully to reach Attorney General John Ashcroft."
In fact, Epstein later says that Barbara Olson indeed did call her husband and tell him that the terrorists had knives and box-cutters.
He also argues that since we've not found the remains of plastic knives and box cutters in the rubble (and how would we know that those weren't in the building and not the plane?) and that somehow casts doubt that the terrorists had them. Then he mentions how they may have had guns and bombs, but we didn't find the remains of those either, and yet the earlier doubts don't apply in that situation?