bridgeport firefighters catalyst converter stolen at fire deptSubmitted by Technical_Success987 t3_11af5qz in Connecticut
ThinButton7705 t1_j9s8am0 wrote
This story was more exciting when I only read the post title. I imagined the cat being stolen from a firetruck. More missed opportunities in Bridgeport
Soggy_Affect6063 t1_j9smdys wrote
Not gonna lie, I thought that too at first! đ¤Ł
Sadly, this is happening across the country more and more since local leaders wonât let citizens protect their property. And if you do itâs âyou escalated the situation so youâre at fault here.â đ¤Śââď¸
The P&S sub was just talking about this.
Badgercakes7 t1_j9trpo7 wrote
So whatâs youâre plan, just sit in your car with a shotgun 24/7? Put an IED strapped ti your catalytic converter?
Soggy_Affect6063 t1_j9tt58r wrote
Whatâs your plan? Come outside in your pajamas with a baseball bat and threaten the two gun wielding thieves to stop stealing your property? No, youâll just call someone else to deal with your problem and hope that they get there in time to apprehend them. Hope they donât post bail, skip the court hearing, and keep on doing what they do. Then youâll come on reddit and complain about ACAB or some trash and then the cycle of insanity continues. đ¤đ¤Śââď¸
Badgercakes7 t1_j9tuhej wrote
Or we could create legislation to go after the legitimate business which are accepting the stolen catalytic converters (which is currently a legal grey area) and stop the problem at its source, while also forcing car insurance companies to cover stolen converters if they donât, instead of making petty theft a death a sentence that can be meted out without a judge or jury, ya know since we are a country laws and have advanced past a lawless hellscape where people can murder each other for perceived slights.
The biggest problem with your plan though? Iâm walking next to your car and I drop something. I roll over and try to fish my whatever out from under your car. You come out of your house and see me rooting around under your car. If we start giving people the ability to respond to perceived theft with deadly force there will be PLENTY of idiots who see me looking for my chapstick or whatever and shoot first and ask questions later because they assume they already know the situation.
Soggy_Affect6063 t1_j9u029p wrote
Oooo, more legislation that they wonât follow. Thatâs the solution. Got a problemâŚjust throw another law and increased insurance premiums to cover the cost of covering those claims in a hope that maybe it stops the people who didnât give a crap about the laws against theft in the first place. Costs gets shifted to any person with a car and even if your insurance covers it, your car is out of commission until itâs repaired. As if people arenât struggling as it is.
I donât know if you have never held a gun or trained with one but this idea that people who own firearms will just pop rounds off if they see someone do anything slightly weird is so friggin annoying and absurd. Why the hell would I come up to you and brandish a firearm on a paper thin suspicion without confirming what you were actually doing is a crime? I wouldnât and neither would the majority of gun owners because it wasnât even happening when gun laws were more relaxed. Iâm pretty sure it doesnât happen to you on a daily basis if ever and there are more gun owners now than there was years ago.
I get it, you donât want to hurt someone. We all donât but there has to be a line drawn somewhere against the criminal who doesnât give a crap about you or your property.
Badgercakes7 t1_j9u1wm1 wrote
How many catalytic converters is an innocent persons life worth?
I have actually fired a gun before, more than a few times which is why I am so disturbed by your idea of allowing and encouraging people to treat petty theft as a threat on their life.
You claim the majority of gun owners would fire until the 100% knew the situation but when you have a gun in your hand and you see someone doing something sketchy, you donât know what theyâre doing, your adrenaline starts kicking in, you start shaking, then stand up suddenly, you donât know if they have a weapon, you hat do you do? Iâm your magical world you claim every gun owner would take the time to do a threat analysis of to determine the exact situation but since weâre not all super genius Sherlock Holmes types who can take in all the evidence and calculate the proper course of action in a split second, people will have to make a snap decision.
When untrained people are making snap decisions with a gun in their hands, innocent people WILL die. Maybe it wonât be you that does it, maybe your too good for that, but someone else will. How many catalytic converters is worth an innocent persons life?
Soggy_Affect6063 t1_j9u7yb9 wrote
âHow many catalytic converters is an innocent persons life worth?â
They arenât innocent if theyâre committing a crime. And againâŚI SAID POSITIVE ID. That doesnât mean you shoot just because they have a weapon and at no time in my reply did I say that thatâs what you do.
âI have actually fired a gun before, more than a few times which is why I am so disturbed by your idea of allowing and encouraging people to treat petty theft as a threat on their life.â
No. Iâm simply stating that a person should have the right and ability to adequately defend their property from potentially armed criminals.
âYou claim the majority of gun owners would fire until the 100% knew the situation but when you have a gun in your hand and you see someone doing something sketchy, you donât know what theyâre doing, your adrenaline starts kicking in, you start shaking, then stand up suddenly, you donât know if they have a weapon, you hat do you do?â
Again, thatâs brandishing and a completely hypothetical reaction not based on anything factual related to this situation. If you want I can provide links to surveillance footage of actual deadly force encounters and you can see for yourself how people react in these kinda of situations.
âIâm your magical world you claim every gun owner would take the time to do a threat analysis of to determine the exact situation but since weâre not all super genius Sherlock Holmes types who can take in all the evidence and calculate the proper course of action in a split second, people will have to make a snap decision.â
What are you even talking about? Youâre saying in my magical world but Iâve been in these scenarios both training and in real life. It doesnât take a sherlok holmes to have a firearm holstered, approach a situation from a position of dominance, and issue verbal commands to stop the criminal act, or defend yourself if they present you with deadly force. Making it known that thereâs a high probability that criminal acts can be met with deadly force if escalated, deters crime. If not, armed guards wouldnât exist.
âWhen untrained people are making snap decisions with a gun in their hands, innocent people WILL die. Maybe it wonât be you that does it, maybe your too good for that, but someone else will.â
Thatâs why training goes hand in hand with being armed and Iâve always said that.
âHow many catalytic converters is worth an innocent persons life?â
Then donât call the police and risk their innocent life when you have a problem. đ¤ˇââď¸
Badgercakes7 t1_j9uddkw wrote
First of all they are innocent. A) our criminal Justice system is based on the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law and b) in case you missed it in my comment, I am referring to a case where a car owner comes up and sees someone near their car and THINKS they are thieves despite the fact that they are not. If I drop my keys and they roll under your car for example. In this case they definitively ARE innocent in every sense of the word.
I have seen plenty of videos of the use of deadly force. How about the one where a police officer shot a kid holding a pear because he thought it was a grenade? There are plenty of videos of people being killed because the person with a gun THOUGHT they were in danger but they either due to a lack of training or just the fact that humans are fallible, jittery idiots on the whole, are capable of making split second mistakes, Including âtrainedâ individuals. And given the current âtrainingâ required to be a gun owner is a power point presentation, a multiple choice test and firing a couple rounds in a gun range, I wouldnât exactly consider that adequate training. You can claim you want gun owners to be better trained for real world situations, fine I can agree with that, but you cannot deny that they currently ARENT and taking woefully untrained people and allowing them and even encouraging them to use firearms in real world situations will, inevitably, lead to them making incorrect assumptions and decisions and will, inevitably, lead to them causing the deaths of innocent people. So I ask again, how many catalytic converters is worth an innocent persons life?
Soggy_Affect6063 t1_j9ujv2z wrote
âFirst of all they are innocent. A) our criminal Justice system is based on the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law and b) in case you missed it in my comment, I am referring to a case where a car owner comes up and sees someone near their car and THINKS they are thieves despite the fact that they are not. If I drop my keys and they roll under your car for example. In this case they definitively ARE innocent in every sense of the word.â
Iâve explained âpositive idâ relative to your example of innocence twice and Iâm not explaining it a third. You obviously arenât getting it.
âI have seen plenty of videos of the use of deadly force. How about the one where a police officer shot a kid holding a pear because he thought it was a grenade? There are plenty of videos of people being killed because the person with a gun THOUGHT they were in danger but they either due to a lack of training or just the fact that humans are fallible, jittery idiots on the whole, are capable of making split second mistakes, Including âtrainedâ individuals. And given the current âtrainingâ required to be a gun owner is a power point presentation, a multiple choice test and firing a couple rounds in a gun range, I wouldnât exactly consider that adequate training. You can claim you want gun owners to be better trained for real world situations, fine I can agree with that, but you cannot deny that they currently ARENT and taking woefully untrained people and allowing them and even encouraging them to use firearms in real world situations will, inevitably, lead to them making incorrect assumptions and decisions and will, inevitably, lead to them causing the deaths of innocent people.â
You are seriously stretching what defines an innocent person as a generalization in these cases. Even more, the kid with a pear. Okay letâs take that case. What information was given to the officer prior to him shooting that kid with a pear vs me happening upon you with your dropped chapstick next to my car? Youâre implying a very choice set of variables that have to happen in sequence that would lead to me thinking that you were stealing my cat. Which is highly unlikely because any thinking person can see that you donât have a sawzall and will probably state that you dropped your chapstick. Iâm saying NO ONE thinks like that unprovoked, armed or not. I beg to ask because there are armed people among us everyday, has that ever happened to you where someone thought you were stealing something and pointed a gun at you without question just because you were bent over?
âSo I ask again, how many catalytic converters is worth an innocent persons life?â
đ¤Śââď¸
Badgercakes7 t1_j9up6ld wrote
Dude. Are you serious? Our police are trained (to some extent) to obtainâpositive idâ of wrong doing prior to using deadly force and guess what? They get it wrong not infrequently. And those are people who do this for a living and are trained, quite specifically, in doing this. And you want to empower some dumbass whose only training is an afternoon sitting through a PowerPoint on gun safety and firing 3 rounds in a gun range to try and do the same thing?
You are so hung up on the idea that people would only use deadly force if the are 100% sure of wrongdoing but that completely isnât the case. Look at Ahmaud Arbery. Those guys killed him, thinking he was a threat, because he was jogging in the âwrongâ neighborhood. People make mistakes, especially when they believe themselves (correctly or incorrectly) to be in a life or death situation. In the case of the kid with the pear, the cop asked the kid to put his hands in the air. He did and he happened to have a pear in his hands, the cop thought it was a grenade so he shot him. Our trained professionals get this wrong, which is the entire reason they are given qualified immunity, and you expect someone without their training to do better? This isnât some Hollywood movie, youâre not a superhero.
Soggy_Affect6063 t1_j9v2mu5 wrote
I love the âthis isnât some hollywood movieâ because pretty much everyone whoâs shot a firearm knows hollywood is trash when it comes to anything realistic about firearms. Also tells me where youâre getting your information from. TV and not the range.
You guys are fine with throwing around âinnocent until proven guiltyâ and want to talk to me about reality but throw around extreme circumstances or outliers that arenât even remotely representative of the values or training of the majority of law enforcement or civilian gun ownership. In both cases people decried the actions of the officer and those looney toons that chased down Amaud.
But since you want to throw around incidents lets go there. Earlier this year an armed citizen, stopped a violent attacker, Estaban padron, who had slashed two other applebees employees. No shots were fired. This happened in upstate NY of all places. Was an âinnocentâ person killed? No. Did it stop the criminal activity? Yes.
Remember Shawn Sutton and his wife Melody? Dude pretended to be a customer to rob a gas station in North Georgia. Two armed customers noticed the situation, stopped the robbery, and held the two at gun point until officers arrived. No one died in that petty theft event.
Or this one. Stopped theft without a shot being fired. I could go on. Thatâs reality.
My invitation is always open if you guys want to hit up the range, a gun class, a self defense and firearms law course both of which are taught by law enforcement and attorneys so you can see for yourself.
Badgercakes7 t1_j9v6smv wrote
I possess and use firearms, I have hands on experience shooting a gun. I did not ever claim that SOME gun owners are capable of what youâre claiming, I am saying that <100% of them are. Iâm sure that people with guns are, in some cases, capable of being useful but statistically speaking, having untrained armed citizens get involved in law enforcement leads to higher likelihood of innocent people (often random bystanders) being shot 12345
Geezer__345 t1_j9ug0eq wrote
So, You just go around shooting innocent people, because they, or what they're doing, looks suspicious. As Yakov Smirnoff once said, "What a Country!"
Besides, Ethics left the building, a long time ago. When Our so-called "Pillars of the Community" commit crimes, and get off, scot-free, or nearly so, why do you expect Ethical Behavior, from the Lower Classes?
I listen to NPR a lot, and a long time ago, and I believe the person quoted was referring to Ronald Reagan: "A fish rots, from the head." I couldn't believe it, but NPR actually brought on a scientist, who assured The Public, that a fish begins rotting, from the liver.
Soggy_Affect6063 t1_j9ukgwg wrote
đ¤Śââď¸ And another one that canât read. What a country indeed.
Geezer__345 t1_j9ufdfl wrote
That could be considered Accepting Stolen Property, and Fencing; too. But just try to enforce it. Some Criminal Organizations also load the stuff into shipping containers, and ship it out of The Country, before Authorities know it.
Badgercakes7 t1_j9uhsyz wrote
The issue is that once the catalytic material is removed from the converter it is basically impossible to prove it was not stolen. So youâre right you cannot enforce it that way. So create requirements that catalytic material sales needs permits and licenses. Or that one-off sales need to provide proof of purchase and that the place purchasing the catalytic converter must obtain prior proof of purchase and retain that proof for a period of so many years.
There are ways to do this, we just arenât.
ertebolle t1_j9ucw5b wrote
Maybe instead create a private cause of action? Let the owners of stolen catalytic converters file massive, ruinous lawsuits against companies buying them, with additional damages awardable to the local police department where the converter was stolen to compensate for their time dealing with / tracking down thieves.
Might be tough to track down the buyer, but if both you and the cops get a ton of money when you do, then everybody would be motivated to put in that effort.
Soggy_Affect6063 t1_j9udzs5 wrote
Like you said, thatâs if you can track down the buyer especially if theyâre taking it out of state. Is there any identification or registration on those cats to prove which one is yours? Honest question.
ertebolle t1_j9udcfb wrote
Maybe instead create a private cause of action? Let the owners of stolen catalytic converters file massive, ruinous lawsuits against companies buying them, with additional damages awardable to the local police department where the converter was stolen to compensate for their time dealing with / tracking down thieves.
Might be tough to track down the buyer, but if both you and the cops get a ton of money when you do, then everybody would be motivated to put in that effort.
(This could work for any stolen auto issue really - somewhere up the chain is a legitimate business and the owners of that business really donât want to get hit with multi million dollar lawsuits for trafficking stolen auto parts)
ertebolle t1_j9uddlq wrote
Maybe instead create a private cause of action? Let the owners of stolen catalytic converters file massive, ruinous lawsuits against companies buying them, with additional damages awardable to the local police department where the converter was stolen to compensate for their time dealing with / tracking down thieves.
Might be tough to track down the buyer, but if both you and the cops get a ton of money when you do, then everybody would be motivated to put in that effort.
(This could work for any stolen auto issue really - somewhere up the chain is a legitimate business and the owners of that business really donât want to get hit with multi million dollar lawsuits for trafficking parts)
BranfordBound t1_j9tluda wrote
This has actually happened. There are also a bunch of stories recently on local news sites about it happening to school buses, too.
Example: https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/East-Hartford-catalytic-converters-school-buses-17735466.php
CiforDayZServer t1_j9ty9y3 wrote
I was going to bring up the school buses lol.
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