Naked Snake

http://wnyt.com/article/stories/s2677899.shtml

http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Nassau-father-son-arrested-on-weapon-charge-3682186.php#photo-3152190

I met this crazy asshole on an IRC channel. One day he admitted to me that he had an illegally sawed-off shotgun and an illegally possessed handgun (he lives in New York, like me, and New York requires a permit to possess handguns). Another user of the channel pointed me to his public profile on the website the channel is dedicated to. On his profile was longitude and lattitude coordinates to his house (seriously? seriously.) and pictures of said illegal guns. Little did I know that the CETME .308 caliber rifle pictured next to his illegal handgun was in fact a fully-automatic machinegun and not a semi-automatic rifle.

I promptly LOL'd about his stupidity and proceeded to paste his public profile in several channels and one person, who was a member of both channels, took notice and LOL'd along with me. During this time, we noted several very disturbing comments and an attitude that suggested that he and his father believed national chaos was imminent and that if it came about that he was going to be free of moral scruples. This was the impetus for us to report him to New York state authorities. We compiled as much evidence (IRC logs, URL of pictures he removed from the HTML of his profile but did not actually delete them from the image host, and his IP / hostmask) and he reported the guy to New York's crime tip line.

As they say, the wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind fine, and as the weeks rolled into months, we wondered if the cops had forgotten about it or something, but then today he got an e-mail (the cops periodically e-mailed back and once called him) saying that they had executed a search warrant at the address provided and had recovered machineguns, sawed-off shotguns (the one he had shown us was clearly visible in the police evidence photos that the news article I read) and pistols. Turns out his father had used a Federal Curio and Relics collector license, which allows you to have elligible firearms shipped directly to your home, to transfer the pistols. However, to do so legally in New York with handguns, you must have a handgun permit, which neither of them had. The machineguns were built from lawfully-acquired parts kits, which are typically built by hobbyists into completely legal semi-automatic firearms (by law, the receivers must vary enough to not accept fully-automatic parts).

I am very pro-gun, I do believe it should be legal to own fully-automatic firearms and it is legal in around 40 states to do so (NY not being one of them) but I also believe that ignoring unjust laws is not a moral way to protest them. It saddens me this young man has been arrested for violating laws that should not exist, particularly the law about "collapsible stocks" that New York has, but at the same time, I cannot pity him too much, he and his father knew full well that they were breaking various State and Federal laws and he was callous enough to make this public for ANYONE that Google searched his IRC nickname (first result, actually) to find.

EDIT : technically they haven't found him or his father guilty, just charged him...but as far as cases go, they just don't get any more closed than that.