guns7n-2-web

 

As we noted with our recent Quote of the Day, firearms prohibition can result in perverse economic incentives. Which is apparently what kept a 500-pound Bronx gang-banger named Wobbles in bidness. “Ten gang members were charged with smuggling assault weapons from Westchester, Connecticut, and Maine and reselling them in the city, said NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The biggest bad boy busted was the group’s hefty ringleader William (Wobbles) Soler, a 33-year-old who allegedly sold 93 weapons — including .22-caliber pistols and semi-automatic rifles — to an undercover officer last year.” . . .

We’re not sure if we want to know exactly where Wobbles concealed the weapons he was spiriting into New York City.

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New York AG Eric Schneiderman wasted no time in issuing a statement for the media.

“This is the way that criminals get guns that they use to murder police officers and murder other New Yorkers,” Schneiderman said at a news conference at his Manhattan office. “People who do this for a living we will pursue as aggressively as we can.”

In fact most of the ten doods apprehended after selling guns to an undercover officer were Bloods members.

So we’re guessing the importers the undercover cop was watching had rap sheets longer than Mayor DeBlasio’s list of grievances agains the NYPD. The question is then, why did the coppers allow Wobbles and his buds to bring in 93 guns? Wouldn’t, say, four or five illegal weapons have been sufficient to make an arrest stick?

Those 93 guns came from somewhere. By letting the sting go on so long, Wobbles’ “supply chain” was acquiring (read: stealing) a lot more guns from lawful gun owners than was necessary. So by letting the situation go on so long, the NYPD was, in effect, abetting crimes being committed in other jurisdictions when they could have stopped them by taking these guys off the street. But what the hell. It makes for some great press for Schneiderman and and New York’s Finest.

 

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56 COMMENTS

  1. OMG, Semi Automatic Rifles! Where’s the drugs, stolen property and prostitutes part?

    • That would be DEA or Secret Service. ATF only sends guns south of the US border.

    • The hookers go to the Secret Service… As long as the Secret Boyz actually *pay* the ladies for their services…

    • Think we can get Shooting The Bull to make a ballistic gelatin model of all 500-plus-pounds of ‘Wobbles’ to see what will take to cut through all that flab?

    • Accur81, as a law enforcement officer, what special techniques are necessary when you have a fat POS like ‘Wobbles’ to apprehend?

      Paddy wagon with a heavy-duty suspension? How many extra officers? Super-sized handcuffs? Do you call in the ambulance crews who occasionally have that to deal with, er, clients like that?

      How do you ‘Cuff-n-Stuff’ an eggroll like that?

      Inquiring (and twisted) minds wanna know… 🙂

      • Multiple handcuffs, possibly flex cuffs, the back or front seat of a Ford Explorer police SUV, and maybe a Cosco-sized vat of Cheetos.

        • If they’re held up in a room somewhere I’m guessing SOP is to dangle a couple Big Macs out side the door to bring them out?

        • Actually I know an old story of a drug dealer apprehended in CT by the DEA who was ‘morbidly obese’. When they brought him in they had to remove the bucket seats from a Ford Windstar and let him take up the whole rear bench seat, and forget about handcuffs… duct tape baby.

      • Apparently NYPD’s SOP is a chokehold for the bigger fellows.

        Oh wait, that’s only for minor crimes.

      • My vote is shoot him dead and come back when he has decomposed to a reasonable size.

  5. I would like to know how many went down the iron river before they even caught on and how many are still being transported? This is a great headline for the AG, but, like with drugs, how many are still flowing through state lines. This is just another chapter in police theater.

  6. That just goes to show: if you make something illegal, it completely stops, 100%.

    Oh wait…I might have misread that…hmm…

  7. Who would sell guns illegally to a stranger, someone they didn’t know? Some criminals are stupid.

    • I’d think most of them have to sell mostly to strangers.

      Also, it’s entirely possible the undercover cops set up a good cover story that made them look clean (i.e. dirty) by leveraging an informant or turning a gang member.

    • According to our LEOs ( some of whom own gun shops) , about all stolen merchandise goes to the big cities to be fenced for money and drugs. Firearms stolen from the country and the suburbs go into the big cities to be sold and distributed to the hoodlums. We have had a couple of murders in my area with blacks leaving the urban environment and coming out here to kill little old ladies and men. The guns used in the crimes were all obtained illegally. O f course now we have smaller town whites doing the same thing with more frequency. Guns illegally obtained of course. All of this involves the drug trade in one form or another. Per the LEOs, it is the same criminals that just keep repeating the same crimes with our revolving door legal system.

      • “Per the LEOs, it is the same criminals that just keep repeating the same crimes with our revolving door legal system.”

        It’s Classic wildlife management of “catch and release”. Wouldn’t want to over fish your own private little lake now would you. Think of laws as being little hooks waiting to catch new fish. Little fish you will have to release and use resources to house or watch over. All the while these fishes are paying fines, court cost, and don’t forget the lawyers. And if you can’t afford a lawyer one will be appointed with tax money. Wake-up America and see the monster for what it is. How often have you heard we don’t need new laws, just enforce the ones you have. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but does anyone really think one more law will do anything to stop criminals from getting guns? Or is it just one more fish hook with your name on it if you make a mistake of unknowingly breaking some gun law you didn’t know about. Shaneen Allen comes to mind when she brought her legal fire arm in to New Jersey. How much economic stimulus do you think her case alone generate in the criminal justice system?

        There is no money in curing a disease. Only in selling you a treatment over and over, week after week, year after year. The criminal justice industrial complex is a large part of the service economy that drives the American economic engine which replaced making real things. This story sadly just reinforces this for me.

  8. M’kay. Let’s us renew the caliber wars. If one wanted to take a wobbles down, what caliber and weapon would one use?

    I’ll start. Sharps, .45-70.

    • I’ll play your silly little game.

      A 1k jog.

      After you tell him he has five minutes before his favorite felafel cart leaves town…permanently.

      • I just had this mental image of wobbles, ass flaps like saddle bags, on a straining Rascal trying to catch that cart.

    • If one wanted to take a wobbles down, what caliber and weapon would one use? At least an 88mm anti-tank gun.

    • Do Cheetos come in calibers? Because I think that’s what’s going to take him down quickest.

    • ” If one wanted to take a wobbles down, what caliber and weapon would one use?”

      .50 BMG HE.

      And an even dozen from ‘Crime Scene Cleanup’ for the… er, …’mess’.

      🙂

    • If we imagine how the hydrostatic shock wave will propagate and reverberate inside the target, it’s obvious that a .22 will suffice. Or a billy club.

  10. “So by letting the situation go on so long, the NYPD was, in effect, abetting crimes being committed in other jurisdictions when they could have stopped them by taking these guys off the street.”

    It sounds like this crew was mostly middlemen, buying guns from crackhead burglars and selling them to gangbangers. So unless some of the guys who got busted in this sting were the actual thieves who stole the guns, it probably doesn’t matter much. With or without Wobbles, the demand for stolen guns is the same. With Wobbles gone, those crackheads will have to find another worthless fatass to sell their stolen merchandise to, a search that will probably take all of three or four minutes…

  12. Wobbles will now be ‘flipped’ as an informant. He will wear a wire and a plaid covering, and go undercover as a couch.
    I feel bad for typing that, but it made me giggle.

  13. Wait a minute, they got guns from CT? But they have all of those common sense, Shannon Watts loving, Bloomberg approved gun laws in place! How could this happen? Especially since Wobbles probably walk out to the car to dive to CT without having to call an ambulance.

  14. Man you’d lose an arm in a “stop and frisk”…when he sits around the house he sits AROUND the house,

  15. Wait, I am confused. I thought the guns did it? Or the evil gun-nuts in Georgia. Or maybe the small local gun stores along the border….

    I am so confused. Are you saying a criminal in NYC is responsible for stealing those guns and selling them illegally to non-background checked buyers.

    How can that be? I thought NYC has the stricted gun control laws in the country. How can that criminal not respect the law?

    I dont understand…wait- I remember- THE GUNS DID IT!!!!

  16. People like this make me wonder if the FBI knows what they are doing setting an 18 in maximum for acceptable penetration. This dude could literally conceal a 60 pound ballistics gel block and it could go undetected.

  17. Seeing that first picture, my only thought was, I feel sorry for that chair he is concealing…

  20. Sounds SO much like Prohibition. When will we ever learn that bans on something does NOT eliminate that thing. Just creates more profit for the criminals. Same with drugs.

  21. He will probably get off on a plea bargain. After all, he had a difficult childhood in a bad neighborhood. Really was not his fault. Probably the blame should go on the guns. They made him do it. 😉

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