Update
From
northjersey.com
I bolded some of my favorites...my comments in
RED
Majority of guns in cache illegal
Friday, June 3, 2005
By YUNG KIM
STAFF WRITER
There were some antique weapons, a World War II machine gun and some black powder muzzle-loading muskets, but the majority of nearly 500 firearms found in a Ridgefield home this week are illegal assault rifles, police said Thursday.
So the WWII machine gun was 'legal'?
"There is no collector value" to many of the weapons, said borough Detective Robert Williams.
"Every one of the guns were in working condition. A few found were loaded, some with fired rounds in the chamber," Williams said.
can we assume these were the notorious bolt action assault rifles?
Sherwin Raymond, 82, remained in police custody Thursday at Hackensack University Medical Center, where authorities said he was receiving dialysis treatment. He is charged with creating a public hazard, which carries a $25,000 bail.
Additional charges were expected as authorities continued to dig through the stockpile of 477 guns taken from Raymond's Abbott Avenue home on Wednesday.
A borough firing range also was sealed on Thursday, but police officials refused to say what role, if any, it plays in their investigation.
Raymond, a former borough police surgeon, is a twice-convicted felon who once sold two silencer-equipped submachine guns to an undercover federal agent. The convictions bar Raymond from collecting weapons.
"Whether he is a collector or not makes no difference," Williams said. "He gave up that right."
What he might have been doing with the seized cache remained an open question.
Among the weapons seized were an undetermined number of AK-47s and 20 Chinese-made SKS semiautomatic rifles with bayonets - both of which are banned in New Jersey.
The overall conditions of the majority of the weapons "were nowhere near collector quality," he said. Is there an objective definition of 'collector quality'?
The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is tracing each of the weapons to help determine where it came from, said Police Chief John Bogovich.
"We are in the beginning stages, and it is probably going to take a minimum of two months to find out the pertinent information," Bogovich said. "Each weapon, depending on where it came from, could be a separate charge."
Police discovered the weapons Monday while escorting Raymond's wife, Elizabeth, back home. The Alzheimer's patient was found wandering disoriented in the neighborhood, they said.
In addition to the firearms, officials also recovered about 100,000 rounds of ammunition, more than 25 large-capacity magazines, and
canister tubes that can be used to make silencers, Williams said.
Or, they can be used as canisters!
The Bergen County Bomb Squad removed 500 pounds of gunpowder that was left in leaking bags - in some cases no more than 4 feet from a boiler, propane tanks and gasoline, Williams said.
"The overall condition was extremely hazardous," Williams said.
Indeed, if the home had been burglarized, "all hell would have broke loose," said Dominick Polifrone, a former head of the New Jersey office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Because the burglars would have triggered an explosion? People should clearly not create hazardous conditions for theives. "Hey, you! Take down that barbed wire! You could put an eye out!
"That was an accident waiting to happen," Polifrone said. "Talk about a war zone -
God forbid this individual started a confrontation. The police would have been very vulnerable. Cause this 82 year old dialysis patient is known in the neighborhood as quite a capable ninja. Rambo Methuselah, they call him.
"If you are a collector with the proper licenses, there is nothing wrong with having as many weapons as you want," Polifrone added. "But the bottom line is, as a felon, those weapons never should have been there."
Assault weapons, which are banned in New Jersey, are relatively easy to come by in other states, such as Pennsylvania, where the guns are legal, he said. The high crime from Vermont is bleeding over into NJ, too!
It's also "very easy" to obtain the needed equipment to convert a semiautomatic rifle - which fires only one bullet at a time before loading the next round - into a full automatic version that spews bullets with a single trigger pull, Polifrone said.
One day, one of these reporters is going to show me how to do this.
Calling Raymond a collector is definitely a stretch, said William Vizzard, professor and chairman of the Division of Criminal Justice at California State University-Sacramento.
Because this yo-yo has seen the 'collection' and has deemed it just a mish-mash.
"Is a guy who owns a junkyard with cars that don't run a collector?" he asked.
Vizzard said he has come across collections of legally owned guns that topped 1,000. Many of the people simply started buying the weapons and couldn't stop, much like former Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos and her now infamous shoe collection, he said.
"You name it and someone is obsessed with it, shoes, motorcycles, cars, art, but
guns have an insidious overtone," Vizzard said. "This [the Ridgefield case] is not that unusual. Most people are just not that stupid."
Nice, I'm being compared to Imelda-but I'm much much worse...insidious, even. Am I better or worse than those people with 200 cats?
E-mail:
[email protected]
No judge in the world would sign a search warrant based on open doors and windows. Use some common sense. 
(Not that there is anything wrong with that.)
Looks like you learn something new every day...
