The Rock Island Auction Blog: Why is the Colt Python So Popular?
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This is a somewhat interesting but mostly lame article on the Best Handgun. No mention of Ted Tedford, production quantities by year, variations in the grips, trivia, etc. I visited Christie's vault once in London and got to handle Ian Fleming's 2-1/2-inch, nickle chrome, Python with a gorgeous factory-engraved inscription to the great novelist.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Mark Wahlberg v. Marc Rich...
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1 of Mark Wahlberg's victims says he shouldn't be pardoned
By PHILIP MARCELO and RODRIQUE NGOWI11 hours ago
BOSTON (AP) — A victim of one of Mark Wahlberg's racially motivated attacks as a teenage delinquent in segregated Boston in the 1980s insists he shouldn't be granted a pardon for his crimes.
Kristyn Atwood was among a group of mostly black fourth-grade students on a field trip to the beach in 1986 when Wahlberg and his white friends began hurling rocks and shouting racial epithets as they chased them down the street.
"I don't think he should get a pardon," Atwood, now 38 and living in Decatur, Georgia, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
"I don't really care who he is. It doesn't make him any exception. If you're a racist, you're always going to be a racist. And for him to want to erase it I just think it's wrong," she said.
Mary Belmonte, the white teacher who brought the students to the neighborhood beach that day, sees things differently. "I believe in forgiveness," she said. "He was just a young kid — a punk — in the mean streets of Boston. He didn't do it specifically because he was a bad kid. He was just a follower doing what the other kids were doing."
The 43-year-old former rapper, Calvin Klein model and "Boogie Nights" actor wants official forgiveness for a separate, more severe attack in 1988, in which he assaulted two Vietnamese men while trying to steal beer. That attack sent one of the men to the hospital and landed Wahlberg in prison.
Wahlberg, in a pardon application filed in November and pending before the state parole board, acknowledges he was a teenage delinquent mixed up in drugs, alcohol and the wrong crowd. He points to his ensuing successful acting career, restaurant ventures and philanthropic work with inner city youths as evidence he's turned his life around.
"I have apologized, many times," he told the AP in December. "The first opportunity I had to apologize was right there in court when all the dust had settled and I was getting shackled and taken away, and making sure I paid my debt to society and continue to try and do things that make up for the mistakes that I've made."
Court documents in the 1986 attack identify Wahlberg among a group of white boys who harassed the school group as they were leaving Savin Hill Beach in Dorchester, a mixed but segregated Boston neighborhood that had seen racial tensions during the years the city was under court-ordered school integration.
The boys chased the black children down the street, repeatedly shouting "n-----" and hurling rocks until an ambulance driver intervened. Wahlberg was 15 at the time.
Atwood says she still bears a scar from getting hit by a rock. No one was seriously injured, but the attack left a lasting impression.
"I was really scared. My heart was beating fast. I couldn't believe it was happening. The names. The rocks. The kids chasing," Belmonte told the AP.
Wahlberg and two other white youths were issued a civil rights injunction: essentially a stern warning that if they committed another hate crime, they would be sent to jail.
In 1988, Wahlberg, then 16, attacked two Vietnamese men while trying to steal beer near his Dorchester home.
According to the sentencing memorandum, he confronted Thanh Lam, a Vietnamese man, as he was getting out of his car with two cases of beer. Wahlberg called Lam a "Vietnam f------ s---" and beat him over the head with a 5-foot wooden stick until Lam lost consciousness and the rod broke in two.
Documents say Wahlberg ran up to another Vietnamese man, Hoa Trinh, and asked for help hiding. After a police cruiser drove past, he punched Trinh in the eye. Later, he made crude remarks about Asians.
Wahlberg ultimately was convicted as an adult of two counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, marijuana possession and criminal contempt for violating the prior civil rights injunction. He was given a three-month prison sentence, of which he served about 45 days.
Trinh declined to be interviewed by AP, and efforts to locate Lam were unsuccessful.
Judith Beals, a former state prosecutor involved in the cases, said Wahlberg's crimes stand out because he violated the injunction with an even more violent attack on people of yet another race.
"It was a hate crime and that's exactly what should be on his record forever," Atwood said. [Sic]
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AP reporters Johnny Clark in Atlanta, Steve LeBlanc in Boston and John Carucci in New York contributed to this report.
Saturday, January 17, 2015
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Mark Wahlberg's victims divided over his pardon request
So the State (prosecutor, supported by a judge, in this instance) perverts the well-settled special treatment for children (juvenile delinquents), throwing them into incarceration with adult criminals of all degrees, where they can be raped or statutorily raped and/or recruited into crime organizations. That in itself is a heinous crime BY the State to deny a minor the legal protections and immunities to which one is, and has always been, entitled. That is patently unjust, a denial of due process, and needs to be sealed and expunged for good! Good Lord! Fortunately, this victim has enough wealth to make the point and fix their corrupt wagon up there in Massachusetts. I hope he does. He could also do well to fund and deploy several dozen lawyers to assist such children caught in an out-of-control and hysterical reaction to rampant crime.
Meanwhile, the intransigent serial financial felon fugitive Marc Rich gets a bunch of absolute pardons from the disbarred Bill Clinton as arranged by the once honorable Eric Holder. Makes me sick!
Apart from that, "prison" is for felonies punishable by a year or more. Anyone sentenced to less than a year could not be sent to state prison, as I understand it, but would be sent to the county jail for the three-months sentenced. I expect the AP reporter doesn't understand that. But the BIG issue is that children are NOT criminals to be marked, blacklisted, and damaged forever by criminal records, but are Juvenile Delinquents to be handled in Juvie Hall outside of the standards and practices of the criminal justice system when they can still be diverted, redirected, and reformed into responsible, law-abiding adults.