The Police are not your friends.
Do not talk to them.
Do not volunteer any information.
This is becoming more evident every day.
In Texas the law says you have a “duty to inform” the police if you have a weapon.
Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.
There is a similar case where a guy travel thru NJ but stopped at his mothers. His mother was concern that he just divorced his wife and might commit suicide. She called the cops to find him. Cops later located him back at his mothers. When ask where his guns were, he told them they were in his car, because he was moving from his old home to a new apartment at a new out of state location. The cops confirmed the story and the guns were packed in the guys towed trailer on the bottom of all his household items. When the report reached the local DA, the DA decided to press charges. According to NJ law, when traveling to old location to new location, one cannot deviate from a reasonable direct route nor can one make stops along the way. Stopping at his mothers place was a violation of NJ gun transportation laws.
Another similar case involved a former out of state police officer who was traveling thru NJ to his new location out of state. He decided to park in a lot to rest and dozed off. Cops came by an noticed a lone car with driver in it and stopped to check. The awoken driver explained what happen and showed ID. One cop noticed the thru the station wagon window some boxes that look like possible gun cases and ordered a search of the vehicle for firearms. Packed guns were found and the out of state driver was charged with violating NJ transportation of gun laws, person must travel from old location directly to new location. No unreasonable stops allowed. Both of these individuals went to jail. Gov Christie commuted the sentence of the first one, but the arrest is still on his record and his right to own guns in the US is forfeited.
It is a law in many states that if you are pulled over by the cops you must disclose that you have a CC permit, even if you do not have the gun in the car. That’s the FIRST thing you say to the cop who pulls you over.
If you do not say it and they run your ID and find out you are a CC permit holder, and you didn’t disclose it up front, you could be in trouble much like this woman was in trouble.
She was probably remembering this law from her CC classes. Too bad that she did not remember the part about different States having different laws.
In most states, having a CHL requires that you inform the officer at a traffic stop. In Texas, you are required to give them your CHL with your driver’s license.
I don’t want to see this woman go to jail, but she should have checked NJ laws before traveling into the state. Responsible gun owners do not make assumptions about the law.
bump
Ever since the so-called War On Drugs (WOD) and, now, the War On Terror (WOT) — actually more like the War On The Bill of Rights) — began, our civilian cops have been undergoing MILITARY training. The authorities gentle it down with the prefix Para but those dynamic entry teams would be more at home in Baghdad than Boston. (Well, unless they hit John Kerrys front door at 3 am, Boston might not be a good example.) Watch Dallas SWAT for a dose of how it works.
I have long thought that that sort of activity within the ranks of otherwise civilian law enforcement was a push by those with an agenda to bypass posse comitatus for purposes BEYOND the WOD/WOT and other currently criminal behavior.
That the mass of that shrinking minority the American citizen (thank you Mr. Open Borders Bush and Total Amnesty Obama) has NOT objected to this erosion of personal liberty does NOT bode well for the future of freedom here.
I wonder what sort of body count of innocent grandmothers and others it will take before folks begin to grasp that they might be more at risk from the cops than the criminals and bring the situation back under control?
My Uncle Bob (R.I.P.) would be horrified.
My Uncle Bob was a 30-year veteran of a police force in suburban Cleveland. He was best man at my wedding in 1962. He served in an era when MOST cops embodied the now frequently hollow motto emblazoned on police units all over this country: TO PROTECT AND SERVE.
The last 10 years of his career were spent as the chief Juvenile Detective in his department. When he died, a number of the young men whose lives he had touched years before came forward to tell how his timely and sometimes tough-love intervention turned them around.
I know that many officers STILL try to live that creed today. I also know that there are officers out there who, despite the rulings by the Supremes that they have no obligation to specific, individual citizens (see Warren v. DC for some fascinating and frightening reading on that), would stand between one of us and a bullet and have.
Having said that, I must also lament that SOME cops are cowboys. Too many are simply power driven megalomaniacs who would have dropped on the OTHER side of the law had their lives drifted a degree or two off the course they did take. It is these clowns who give credence to the wry bit of humor that there is no situation than cannot be made worse by the presence of the cops.
I believe this to be especially true of far too many federal law enforcement types who have allowed their egos and hubris to become as bloated as the bureaucratic federal behemoth they serve. (See footnote below). Their mandate is no longer to
protect and serve the citizens who pay their salaries: It is to crush any meaningful resistance to a growing body of procedures, regulations and policies too frequently enforced under severely tortured interpretations of the underlying legislative enactments (if any) and often put in place by executive fiat. The massively abused SEIZURE statutes laws the author of which now seeks to RESCIND! — spring to mind.
And one cannot but help to wonder how the clear to anyone with half a brain criminality of the Clintons and now Obama and their subsequent avoidance of any penalty has played into the problem? There now seems to be a bright line between the easy, highly flexible, slap-on-the-wrist law for the rich and powerful and the rigidly enforced law against even the tiniest victimless crimes committed by those of us further down the food chain. Does anyone in his right mind believe THAT will NOT engender added disrespect for ALL law?
Could those things be a large part of the problem in some of the highly disturbing and DEADLY (on BOTH sides) confrontations we have witnessed over the past decade or so? Gordon Kahl, Ruby Ridge, OK City, Waco, Beck
This list WILL lengthen and wed all better pray that WE will be spared.
Roman historian Tacitus warned that one could tell the level of corruption in a society by the NUMBER of its laws. Anyone doubt the level of corruption here?
Am I the only one who thinks were long overdue a serious review of the NUMBERS of laws under which we are now forced to exist and which are increasingly used not to assure our safety or well-being, but to COMMAND AND CONTROL us and KEEP US IN LINE.
Only the most tyrannical and power-crazed members of law enforcement could possibly object to that.
The modern counterparts of my uncle would not object.
It is THEY, after all, who are most likely to catch that bullet probably fired by someone who has symbolically screamed to himself IM MAD AS HELL AND IM NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANY MORE — referred to earlier when they sally forth to serve that flimsy warrant or make that bogus arrest.
Dick Bachert (1999) Updated 12/2010
FOOTNOTE:
At a cocktail party back in the late 80’s, I struck up a conversation with a fellow — his name was Joe M. — whom I’d met on one or two previous events. After my first encounter, Joe’s neighbor and my boss at the time told me that Joe was an alcoholic who had just retired from 25 years with the IRS. Needless to say, I was guarded in expressing my political views to Joe as the IRS had helped my dad into an early grave in 1977 — at age 59 over an estate matter. Joe was pretty deep into his cups at the function in question and began telling IRS “war stories.” Most had to do with clear cases of criminal conduct by not very nice people. Joe — who was a few years short of 60 — sounded to me like someone who enjoyed helping getting really bad people off the street and I asked why he’d retired early. He told me that what he called “the service” had changed for the worse. Then I asked him about the new people coming in. He shook his head, actually teared up and said that many of them were “really bad.” I pressed. “Really bad” meant incompetent? “No — DANGEROUS,” he responded “they like to hurt people.”
It was then that I think I understood why Joe drank.
People should realize the police attempt to solve crime, not prevent it. The police have some good and some bad apples. Best keep your mouth shut and demand a lawyer guilty or not. We had a local case where a man was picked up on suspicion of buying stolen property because he admitted buying it from a neighbor. While being questioned he volunteered to stand in a line up on a rape case in an attempt to curry favor with the cops. Seven years of prison time served later he was freed on a DNA test.