Police: Pack of teens showing guns, stealing iPhones near Public Garden
Boston Police report three armed holdups around the Public Garden within a span of a few minutes Thursday evening. In all three cases, the victims were robbed of iPhones by Hispanic males in their late teens or early 20s.
In one case, a man reported he was approached by four or five Hispanic teens who showed a gun, demanded money, got away with his iPod. In another case, a man reported he was talking on his iPhone when approached by four Hispanic teens, one of whom ripped the phone from his hand and ran in the direction of Beacon Street.
In the third case, a man walking down Public Alley 421, near Beacon and Arlington, was on his iPhone when approached by two young Hispanic males, one of whom showed a gun and demanded his phone. In that case, police say one of the suspects was about 5'7," clean shaven and with a long dark pony tail, dressed in a gray hoody and sweatpants.
Location
- Add new comment |
- Send to a friend |
| 
| 
I hope they try and jack my
I hope they try and jack my iphone.
Hint...I have a CCW.
Good
God bless you for carrying out your Second Amendment rights. I'd love to see you put a bullet into these little shits.
Teenagers with a gun
You draw your weapon.
They're a teen, and their reflexes are probably faster than yours.
They're stupid and overconfident, so they shoot.
They're untrained, so they hit a bystander in addition to grazing you.
You're trained, and you shoot the teen with your gun.
The rest lunge at you as they draw knives, and you shoot two more, before the remainder turn and run.
The publicity from shooting "kids" causes you to lose your job, and the legal expenses for criminal a defense lawyer and then a civil defense lawyer takes your life's savings and your house.
You become dependent on public assistance, which is antithetical to your previously-CCW-carrying self-sufficient self image.
You find new watering holes, where people don't know you're the guy who shot up those kids.
You find a lot of such watering holes, and people start remembering you less as the guy who shot up those kids, and more as the crazy drunken panhandler.
When you're sober enough to make it to the soup kitchen, you're served by bright-eyed teenage preppy punks who are padding their college applications with public service.
They pity broken, broken you for not being as success-oriented and capable as themselves.
You're too drunk to fully understand or care.
Your fellow street people stab you on a couple occasions, and you're crippled from several drunken falls and concussions, but you don't die until two decades later, on a street grate, miserably, of failed liver.
There are no nostalgic newspaper articles or blog entries in your honor, even by hipsters who think that talking with street people makes them more hip, since you were a mean drunk who people say shot some kids.
Are you *sure* you wish for an armed confrontation with some worthless teenage iPod-robbing punks? :)
If there's evidence
that he was defending himself, he's alright in my book. I would hope that civilized people would have the same understanding.
If someone points a firearm
If someone points a firearm at you in commission of a robbery, can you pull your own firearm, discharge it and claim self-defense?
Apart from the question of weather you get yourself shot, I'm not so sure you can unless you have reason to believe that you must discharge your weapon to defend yourself as opposed to your property. IANAL
Are you supposed to wait
Are you supposed to wait until they shoot you?
As soon as someone threatens serious physical harm to you or someone else (doesn't need to be a gun), you're justified to defend yourself.
As for the long winded story above. I think he's been watching too many movies. If some punk trying to rob me sees a gun, I'd wager he pisses himself and his friends run away. These guys are expecting everyone to be unarmed and afraid.
Too many movies?
See my earlier response further below in the comments tree, regarding how realistic it is that teen in this story would be made to soil himself by seeing a gun.
I'm not anything like an expert, but, mostly by virtue of some work that had me on city streets at night a lot, I've had numerous run-ins with street robbers (only actually lost anything once). In all cases, by the time showing a CCW weapon would constitute justifiable self defense rather than assault with a deadly weapon, the bad guy has a gun on you. In my experience, the gun is pointed a bit down initially (say, towards your gut), I guess so that you can actually see the gun clearly. Now, think about the typical reflexes and coordination of a stereotypical street-robber teen, and try to be realistic about the probabilities of various scenarios in which your CCW would end the encounter in your favor. Despite the typical poor training of teens, my own guess is that, most likely, you'd escalate the situation to the point of taking at least one slug to your abdomen.
Widespread CCW in a locale might indeed curb street robberies through deterrent, but I don't put good odds on isolated CCW Dirty Harry wannabes in actual encounters like in the story we're commenting on.
Maybe Pete Nice or someone else with established credibility will drop by and correct me, but I'm not finding random anons convincing.
We'll if I can't convince
We'll if I can't convince you, so be it.
Soiling oneself is really must a colloquialism. Robbers are usually pretty scared, jacked-up to begin with just performing the deed on an unarmed person.
I really don't think some teen thugs are prepared or have thought out their actions. Seeing another gun should convince them to run and find easier prey.
But, this is all speculation for both you and I. Hopefully these cretin will be caught long before they jack someone else.
steet robbers
The majority of street robbers, gas station robbers, bank robbers, and convience store robbers do not want to hurt anyone. They use a weapon (many times fake) just so the victim will give the robber money or goods as fast as possible, and without a fight. Putting fear in a victim with a weapon will make the victim not fight back, not try to escape, and not try to call the police right away. This gives the robber the best chance of getting the money and escaping.
As much as we love to hear about the guy breaking into a house and then the owner shooting him while the robber tries to attack him, it is rarely that clean cut. Even a few months ago a Framingham cop was shot in the face by a convience store robber. And this cop was trained, had a gun, and still almost got killed.
I mean, you have to think of the bottom line here. How much are you going to lose if a guy on the street comes up to you, points a gun at you, and asks you for your money? Cash in your wallet? A few hourse of trying to get copies of your documents (license, credit cards). If you have a firearm (and the license to carry it of course), do you have it holstered? Are you trained for a quick draw? My opinion is that you are playing Russian Roulette in that situation.
Now you certainly have the constitutional right to defend yourself. In public you have a 'duty to retreat' which might hinder you in a civil lawsuit if you are sued by a robber that you killed if that robber did not also have a gun. Will made a comment on how he hoped that "civilized people would have the same understanding". Wishfull thinking, but good guys like Will dont always end up on top when they are trying to protect themselves. You can bet if you killed someone else by accident that you would be responsible in a civil court for that shooting.
Now guns are a deterrent in many situations. Bank Robbers don't rob banks with armed guards (and you see more of them lately). Id say about half of the bank robbers in Boston actually use real guns anyway, so you can bet they arent going to be ready for a fight with an armed guard so thats one of the reasons. I would also assume that if 75% of people in neighborhood A had guns, street robberies in neighborhood A would probably go down.
And in MA we dont call them CCW, they are called LTC's and you would need a class A one to carry a consealed firearm in public.
More likely a trained person
More likely a trained person with a CCW causes the assailants to piss themselves and surrender.
If little punks thought there was a good chance of being killed in a robbery attempt, they'd stop robbing people. But in this state, they know most people are sheep, and they can steal all night, only to get cushy summer jobs and free sports equipment from the candy ass mayor.
The herd mentality needs to stop, and people need to adopt a pack mentality. Kowtowing to criminals only emboldens them. If the little bastards faced immediate consequences to their actions, they'd think less of criminal activity as means to get what they want.
I don't think you've ever tried this...
Two different scenarios:
1. A teenager with a gun pointed at you, who, atop normal teenage sense of near-invincibility, is practically delirious with confidence from the power and associations of the gun.
2. A teenager with a gun pointed at you, who is scared.
Either way, I think that drawing your weapon is more likely to get you shot than to make such a teenager become simultaneously humbled and sensible, which would be required for them to surrender to you.
I don't fully disagree with all of your other points, but I think your first sentence is unrealistic.
comedy
neilv is hilarious!
if they have Mobile Me and
if they have Mobile Me and set up "find my iPhone," you can get a GPS location of your lost or stolen iPhone. If you can't get the phone back, at least you can do a remote wipe, which resets the phone to factory settings, so they can't get your personal information... but only if you have Mobile Me.
Obvious need
For an "Electrocute User Remotely" iPhone app.
So don't use an iphone
be careful folks. Be mindful of your surroundings and don't show jewelry or expensive iphones around. But if some punks threten you, you have all the right to exercise lethal force. Unless somebody stand up on these punks or police get them first, they will continue to do these criminal acts.
Why don't these punks go to our city and rob our Iphones. Kennesaw Georgia!!!!
Kennesaw, Georgia
I assume that the anon is referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw,_Georgia#Gun_law