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- Goose
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A Gun From Georgia Is Linked to a New York Officer’s Death, Again
A Gun From Georgia Is Linked to a New York Officer’s Death, Again
By AL BAKER and J. DAVID GOODMANMAY
5, 2015
Early one October morning in 2011, two masked men with gloved hands smashed their way into a roadside pawnshop in rural Georgia, fleeing with 23 handguns.
Four years later, on a street in Queens on Saturday, a man raised one of those guns — a silver, five-shot Taurus revolver — and fired three times at New York police officers. A bullet struck Officer Brian Moore in the face; he died on Monday.
His death followed the killing of two officers in December in Brooklyn. That time, the handgun turned on officers also came from a gun shop a thousand miles away from the city, just 90 miles away in the same Southern state.
Law enforcement officials have long focused on Georgia and neighboring states with looser gun laws as the starting point of a so-called iron pipeline of guns flowing north, to New York and other cities, where the restrictions on legal gun purchases are more stringent — and the profits higher for traffickers.
Taken together, the two guns used in the recent police killings illustrate the twisting paths of firearms trafficking that frustrate investigators. Eight other guns taken in the 2011 burglary of Little’s Bait & Tackle Pawn Shop in Perry, Ga., have turned up in New York City, officials said.
Naseem Akhtar, with her 1-year-old daughter, Aiza, in her backyard in Queens after a police search for the gun used to kill an officer. It was found on Monday at an adjacent property. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
“If you’re willing to take the risk and engage in this illegal activity, the payoff is greater,” Stephen D. Lynn, the chief of police in Perry, whose officers are still hunting the burglars who broke into the local shop in 2011, said on Tuesday, a day after the police in New York disclosed the origins of the gun they believe was used against Officer Moore. “If you stole a $500 gun in Georgia and sold it in Georgia, you’re probably going to get less for it.”
For several months, burglars targeted Perry. Twelve more guns were stolen from Little’s a month later, in November 2011, and those have yet to turn up anywhere, Chief Lynn said. And a third burglary occurred in April 2012 at another gun shop in the town, which is about 30 miles south of Macon, though the guns from that episode were later recovered, he said.
No arrests have been made in either burglary at Little’s. Chief Lynn said the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had assisted in the investigation.
On Tuesday, the small, sparsely stocked shop on General Courtney Hodges Boulevard had the feel of a hunting outpost: fishing rods, salt licks, eight shotguns mounted on a pegboard wall. A vintage refrigerator brimmed with worms and maggots for fishing. The sound of crickets, sold out of a large box in the back, filled the store as customers passed over its blue carpeted floor in a steady flow, mostly buying bait for less than $2.
“Bait alone doesn’t make you rich, but bait keeps people coming back,” said Nell Little, the sister-in-law of the 76-year-old owner, Clarence Little, who, she said, was gone until Saturday. “Just an old country store, I don’t know what to tell you.”
She said the family knew before the shooting on Saturday that some of the guns stolen in 2011 had ended up in New York. The one used in the shooting, she estimated, would have sold for $300 to $385. She said she was sad to hear about Officer Moore, who was 25, and she said Mr. Little was selling fewer and fewer guns as he prepared to sell the store and retire.
“It’s bad any way you look at it,” Ms. Little said.
In New York, the Police Department and the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association said on Tuesday that a wake for Officer Moore, the son of a retired police officer, would be held on Thursday in Bethpage, on Long Island, near the family home in North Massapequa. Then the police funeral, with its thousands of officers in rows of blue uniforms, will be held on Friday in St. James Roman Catholic Church on Long Island, the same church where officers mourned Edward R. Byrne, a rookie officer shot dead in 1988, also in Queens.
Evidence in the killing of Officer Moore was to be presented to a grand jury on Tuesday as Queens prosecutors sought a first-degree murder indictment against Demetrius Blackwell, 35, who grew up in the same corner of Queens Village where, the authorities said, he killed Officer Moore. One of Mr. Blackwell’s cousins, who also lived in the neighborhood and went on to play football for the New York Giants, said on Tuesday that he was “devastated” by the killing.
“For years, our family tried to help Demetrius lead a more productive and law-abiding life,” the cousin, Kory Blackwell, said in a statement.
After two days of searching, investigators found the gun used in the shooting in a backyard under a box near a grill. It had three expended rounds in its chamber and two live ones, the police said.
As officers put black bands over their badges, and officials lowered the flags in the city to half-staff, detectives on Tuesday dug into the background of the gun used in the shooting of Officer Moore, including testing to see if the weapon had been used in other crimes.
The gun believed to have killed Officer Moore and the gun used to kill Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in December followed different paths from Georgia to New York.
The semiautomatic pistol used against Officers Liu and Ramos was bought legally 18 years ago from a sprawling bonanza of low-cost weaponry in Jonesboro, Ga. As recently as 2010, the store, Arrowhead Pawn Shop, was the leading out-of-state source of guns recovered in crimes by the New York Police Department.
Little’s, by contrast, is a roadside shop whose longtime owner enjoys a good relationship with the 35-member Police Department in Perry, a town of 16,000 that hosts an annual state fair. Of the 23 guns stolen in October 2011, nine were recovered in New York City, including the .38-caliber revolver used to kill Officer Moore. The owner of Little’s reported the thefts in 2011 to local authorities as well as to the federal firearms agency, as required by law.
Of the nine other handguns recovered from the October 2011 burglary at Little’s, three turned up in the Bronx months later, including a pink Taurus .380-caliber pistol taken from a man arrested in February 2012 on a charge of possession of crack cocaine. Five others were taken off the street as part of continuing investigations, and another was found by the police in Pawtucket, R.I., last May.
On Tuesday, the stock of handguns at Little’s was slim, with just two visibly for sale on the shelves. A handwritten sign hung in the shop window: “Armed guard on duty 24-7! COME ON IN!!!”
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
- Common Sense
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Re: A Gun From Georgia Is Linked to a New York Officer’s Death, Again
Goose wrote:
A Gun From Georgia Is Linked to a New York Officer’s Death, Again
By AL BAKER and J. DAVID GOODMANMAY
5, 2015
Early one October morning in 2011, two masked men with gloved hands smashed their way into a roadside pawnshop in rural Georgia, fleeing with 23 handguns.
Four years later, on a street in Queens on Saturday, a man raised one of those guns — a silver, five-shot Taurus revolver — and fired three times at New York police officers. A bullet struck Officer Brian Moore in the face; he died on Monday.
His death followed the killing of two officers in December in Brooklyn. That time, the handgun turned on officers also came from a gun shop a thousand miles away from the city, just 90 miles away in the same Southern state.
Law enforcement officials have long focused on Georgia and neighboring states with looser gun laws as the starting point of a so-called iron pipeline of guns flowing north, to New York and other cities, where the restrictions on legal gun purchases are more stringent — and the profits higher for traffickers.
Taken together, the two guns used in the recent police killings illustrate the twisting paths of firearms trafficking that frustrate investigators. Eight other guns taken in the 2011 burglary of Little’s Bait & Tackle Pawn Shop in Perry, Ga., have turned up in New York City, officials said.
Naseem Akhtar, with her 1-year-old daughter, Aiza, in her backyard in Queens after a police search for the gun used to kill an officer. It was found on Monday at an adjacent property. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
“If you’re willing to take the risk and engage in this illegal activity, the payoff is greater,” Stephen D. Lynn, the chief of police in Perry, whose officers are still hunting the burglars who broke into the local shop in 2011, said on Tuesday, a day after the police in New York disclosed the origins of the gun they believe was used against Officer Moore. “If you stole a $500 gun in Georgia and sold it in Georgia, you’re probably going to get less for it.”
For several months, burglars targeted Perry. Twelve more guns were stolen from Little’s a month later, in November 2011, and those have yet to turn up anywhere, Chief Lynn said. And a third burglary occurred in April 2012 at another gun shop in the town, which is about 30 miles south of Macon, though the guns from that episode were later recovered, he said.
No arrests have been made in either burglary at Little’s. Chief Lynn said the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had assisted in the investigation.
On Tuesday, the small, sparsely stocked shop on General Courtney Hodges Boulevard had the feel of a hunting outpost: fishing rods, salt licks, eight shotguns mounted on a pegboard wall. A vintage refrigerator brimmed with worms and maggots for fishing. The sound of crickets, sold out of a large box in the back, filled the store as customers passed over its blue carpeted floor in a steady flow, mostly buying bait for less than $2.
“Bait alone doesn’t make you rich, but bait keeps people coming back,” said Nell Little, the sister-in-law of the 76-year-old owner, Clarence Little, who, she said, was gone until Saturday. “Just an old country store, I don’t know what to tell you.”
She said the family knew before the shooting on Saturday that some of the guns stolen in 2011 had ended up in New York. The one used in the shooting, she estimated, would have sold for $300 to $385. She said she was sad to hear about Officer Moore, who was 25, and she said Mr. Little was selling fewer and fewer guns as he prepared to sell the store and retire.
“It’s bad any way you look at it,” Ms. Little said.
In New York, the Police Department and the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association said on Tuesday that a wake for Officer Moore, the son of a retired police officer, would be held on Thursday in Bethpage, on Long Island, near the family home in North Massapequa. Then the police funeral, with its thousands of officers in rows of blue uniforms, will be held on Friday in St. James Roman Catholic Church on Long Island, the same church where officers mourned Edward R. Byrne, a rookie officer shot dead in 1988, also in Queens.
Evidence in the killing of Officer Moore was to be presented to a grand jury on Tuesday as Queens prosecutors sought a first-degree murder indictment against Demetrius Blackwell, 35, who grew up in the same corner of Queens Village where, the authorities said, he killed Officer Moore. One of Mr. Blackwell’s cousins, who also lived in the neighborhood and went on to play football for the New York Giants, said on Tuesday that he was “devastated” by the killing.
“For years, our family tried to help Demetrius lead a more productive and law-abiding life,” the cousin, Kory Blackwell, said in a statement.
After two days of searching, investigators found the gun used in the shooting in a backyard under a box near a grill. It had three expended rounds in its chamber and two live ones, the police said.
As officers put black bands over their badges, and officials lowered the flags in the city to half-staff, detectives on Tuesday dug into the background of the gun used in the shooting of Officer Moore, including testing to see if the weapon had been used in other crimes.
The gun believed to have killed Officer Moore and the gun used to kill Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in December followed different paths from Georgia to New York.
The semiautomatic pistol used against Officers Liu and Ramos was bought legally 18 years ago from a sprawling bonanza of low-cost weaponry in Jonesboro, Ga. As recently as 2010, the store, Arrowhead Pawn Shop, was the leading out-of-state source of guns recovered in crimes by the New York Police Department.
Little’s, by contrast, is a roadside shop whose longtime owner enjoys a good relationship with the 35-member Police Department in Perry, a town of 16,000 that hosts an annual state fair. Of the 23 guns stolen in October 2011, nine were recovered in New York City, including the .38-caliber revolver used to kill Officer Moore. The owner of Little’s reported the thefts in 2011 to local authorities as well as to the federal firearms agency, as required by law.
Of the nine other handguns recovered from the October 2011 burglary at Little’s, three turned up in the Bronx months later, including a pink Taurus .380-caliber pistol taken from a man arrested in February 2012 on a charge of possession of crack cocaine. Five others were taken off the street as part of continuing investigations, and another was found by the police in Pawtucket, R.I., last May.
On Tuesday, the stock of handguns at Little’s was slim, with just two visibly for sale on the shelves. A handwritten sign hung in the shop window: “Armed guard on duty 24-7! COME ON IN!!!”
Ok…. Two masked men smashed their way into a pawnshop in rural Georgia and steal
23 hand guns.
And then the story goes on to tell about another burglary of eight guns and so goes the story about Criminals breaking into stores and stealing weapons that eventually turn up in New York
What would “lose gun laws” have to do with criminals breaking into store and stealing weapons that end up in New York?
They are stealing them….. Even in the South I think that is a felony to commit a burglary? So all kinds of felonies going on here. But it's the loose gunlaws causing the problem?
They say the profits are higher? That is nowhere as a fact in the story?
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” former vice president Biden said during a campaign event in Texas on Monday. "All men and women created by — you know, you know, the thing.”
- Goose
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Re: A Gun From Georgia Is Linked to a New York Officer’s Death, Again
How would address the problem of guns being brought up from southern states that kill police officers in NYC?
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
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Thread Starter- Common Sense
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Re: A Gun From Georgia Is Linked to a New York Officer’s Death, Again
How would address the problem of guns being brought up from southern states that kill police officers in NYC?
I would make it mandatory that if you were a felon in possession of a weapon or
use the weapon in the commission of a crime you would receive 15 year sentence.
There is no good time and no early outs! Plus you would have any time for the other crimes.
People are going to think really hard before risking 15 years just for the weapon violation!
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” former vice president Biden said during a campaign event in Texas on Monday. "All men and women created by — you know, you know, the thing.”
- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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- Registered: 1/29/2015
- Posts: 13,427
Re: A Gun From Georgia Is Linked to a New York Officer’s Death, Again
How would address the problem of guns being brought up from southern states that kill police officers in NYC?
I would make it mandatory that if you were a felon in possession of a weapon or
use the weapon in the commission of a crime you would receive 15 year sentence.
There is no good time and no early outs! Plus you would have any time for the other crimes.
People are going to think really hard before risking 15 years just for the weapon violation!
I could go along with that.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
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Thread Starter- Common Sense
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- Registered: 2/16/2015
- Posts: 3,256
Re: A Gun From Georgia Is Linked to a New York Officer’s Death, Again
How would address the problem of guns being brought up from southern states that kill police officers in NYC?
I would make it mandatory that if you were a felon in possession of a weapon or
use the weapon in the commission of a crime you would receive 15 year sentence.
There is no good time and no early outs! Plus you would have any time for the other crimes.
People are going to think really hard before risking 15 years just for the weapon violation!
I could go along with that.
Hey I am calling 911 right now...... feeling lighted headed. No battle over a gun story?
I nice change of pace! Thanks Goose a true surprise!!
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” former vice president Biden said during a campaign event in Texas on Monday. "All men and women created by — you know, you know, the thing.”
- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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- Registered: 1/29/2015
- Posts: 13,427
Re: A Gun From Georgia Is Linked to a New York Officer’s Death, Again
I would make it mandatory that if you were a felon in possession of a weapon or
use the weapon in the commission of a crime you would receive 15 year sentence.
There is no good time and no early outs! Plus you would have any time for the other crimes.
People are going to think really hard before risking 15 years just for the weapon violation!
I could go along with that.
Hey I am calling 911 right now...... feeling lighted headed. No battle over a gun story?
I nice change of pace! Thanks Goose a true surprise!!
Let's go for broke and add a universal background check law to keep felons from buying a gun in the first place.
Please?
Also, I don't think that people convicted of a violent felony should ever have their gun rights restored.
Last edited by Goose (5/06/2015 3:34 pm)
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
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Thread Starter- The Man
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Re: A Gun From Georgia Is Linked to a New York Officer’s Death, Again
I could go along with that.Hey I am calling 911 right now...... feeling lighted headed. No battle over a gun story?
I nice change of pace! Thanks Goose a true surprise!!
Let's go for broke and add a universal background check law to keep felons from buying a gun in the first place.
Please?
Also, I don't think that people convicted of a violent felony should ever have their gun rights restored.
I agree. But I would also add mental health evaluations should be required to obtain a gun.
- Goose
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Re: A Gun From Georgia Is Linked to a New York Officer’s Death, Again
I'd go along with that as well.
What's gotten into me? 
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
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Thread Starter- Jeerleader
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Re: A Gun From Georgia Is Linked to a New York Officer’s Death, Again
The headline should read:
Another career criminal who should have been in jail uses an illegal gun to kill a cop; laws on the legal sale of lawful guns blamed . . . Again.
Last edited by Jeerleader (5/06/2015 4:31 pm)
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