TexasCHLforum.com

03Lightningrocks wrote:Thanks for the explanation. Remembering your history from some of your posts on this forum, I have no doubt you know of what you speak.

The only sidebar I would like to mention is something I noticed back when I would travel to that part of the country while drag racing. One of our big races was at Englishtown. You probably know the area. It use to amuse me how many of the fellers from the Jersey area perceived guns. I think they saw them as having a soul or something. "Guns are bad" seemed to be the prevailing thought. Hollow point bullets were even more evil. Just the sight of a hollow point round would cause a major controversial conversation. I always laughed and blamed it on something in the water.

Then you could drive a few miles over the border into PA and find friendlies. It was strange for a feller coming from a State as large as Texas to realize fifty miles is all that separated liberal strongholds from conservative strongholds. I always found that part of the country interesting but never thought I would want to live in it.

In celebration of the difference, the PA folks used to maintain a sign at the exact center of one of the bridges between the two states. It stated something along the lines of: You have left New Jersey. Welcome to the United States.

I don't remember which bridge or know if it's still there, but it spoke volumes about how the PA folks felt about what goes on in NJ.

A few notes on the propaganda piece masquerading as a news article:

1. Don't blame New York here. You have to understand the context to get what's going on. The incident occurred in a station for the PATH train between New York and New Jersey. The officers were Port Authority (PA) officers (not NYPD) who patrol facilities operated by the Port Authority. The PA is an interstate agency and their officers have jurisdiction in both states in order to make policing transportation that crosses state lines practical. Many are from New Jersey, where possession of a single hollow point round by a civilian is a felony. It is not an offense at all in New York, where you can readily buy hollowpoints in any store that sells ammunition, as the miscreant in the article revealed.

2. The officer who was quoted was clearly poorly informed about the ballistic reality that hollow point rounds are slightly more readily stopped by bullet resistant vests than solid points. From this point of view, they could be called "cop saver" bullets with some thin justification. The core reality however is that the difference between a cop killer round and a thug stopper round isn't in the composition or configuration of the projectile - it's in the use it's put to by the person who fires it.

3. Many officers in this area, particularly those from NJ, have been heavily propagandized to the point of brainwashing. The nonthinkers buy into this hook line and sinker, and proudly spout the type of nonsense that comes from the ignorant because they figure their bosses will really like what they said (probably true). The fact that they are police officers makes this more visible and embarrassing, but there's little difference between an ignorant citizen and an ignorant cop, other than the fact that some folks think all cops know what they're talking about. This is no more true with cops than it is with any other occupation.