Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Survivalist Gun Nut Terrorizes Area

The way this guy carries firearms - which presumably an integral part of HIS weirdo notions of being 'free' and capable of defending himself - is why the gun lunatics carrying firearms terrorize the rest of us.  You want us to just 'trust' that you won't use them badly, that you won't act irrationally, that you won't have an accident, or that you have them secured properly. We DON'T trust you, and we have weekly, essentially daily, evidence to support that distrust is well-founded.

We are safer and MORE FREE, free of having to worry about what stupid or crazy or clumsy dumbass thing you idiots with guns will do next, when you DON'T carry around unnecessary firearms, either open or concealed carry.

You are all just more or less inept variations on this guy, with minor variations in the delusional fantasies you substitute for reality.  This guy just gets his hands dirtier, and has better practical skills than most of you do.

Hey - maybe he's just part of an elusive social club, like those Michigan militia fanatics?

.From the Huff Po and the AP :

Cabin Burglar Troy Knapp Considered Armed And Dangerous: Utah Cops

By BRIAN SKOLOFF and PAUL FOY   02/22/12 03:37 AM ET  AP
Cabinburglar
Troy Knapp is accused of burglarizing dozens of homes in the southern Utah wilderness.
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SALT LAKE CITY -- Troy James Knapp is a wanted man, a mountain recluse authorities say is responsible for more than two dozen cabin burglaries in the remote southern Utah wilderness. He's considered armed and dangerous, a ticking time bomb.
It took at least three years for authorities to identify him from fingerprints lifted from vacation homes near Zion National Park.
Now, they just have to catch him. Knapp remains somewhere in roughly 1,000 square miles of wilderness, a virtual ghost in the woods stocked with stolen gear, food and guns.
"This guy is probably about as true a survivalist as Davy Crockett," Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marshal Michael Wingert told The Associated Press.
Authorities have so far revealed little about the 44-year-old Knapp or how he ended up wandering the mountains of southern Utah. They identified him Tuesday and asked the public for help in finding him.
Knapp has family members in Moscow, Idaho, but phone messages left for them Tuesday evening were not returned.
Just last week, detectives in Iron County said investigators hadn't made a definite identification but were getting close. However, court records indicate charges were filed against Knapp in neighboring Kane County about three weeks ago as the key suspect in the serial burglaries.
According to the records filed Jan. 27, Knapp's fingerprints lifted from one cabin in 2009 were matched on Jan. 20 to records from a 2000 theft arrest in California. The records indicate only that he has been convicted previously on charges of assault with a dangerous weapon and burglaries.
Wingert said Knapp "dropped off everybody's radar in 2003 and nobody has heard from him since."
"He just dropped off the face of the earth," Wingert added, speculating that Knapp was "fed up with civilization."
He now faces multiple counts of burglary and a weapons charge.
In a statement Tuesday evening, the Iron County Sheriff's Office said tips from the public and forensic evidence linked Knapp to the crimes.
"This suspect is known to be armed and could be possibly dangerous if cornered," the statement read, adding that his identification was the result of "good old-fashioned investigative work, along with tips provided by the public."
"We believe Mr. Knapp is our guy," Wingert said.
Iron County Sheriff's Detective Jody Edwards said last week that investigators were still scouring for clues. He indicated authorities were getting close to solving the case after they got the first pictures of the suspect from a motion-triggered surveillance camera outside a cabin. The photos taken sometime in December showed a sandy-haired man in camouflage on snowshoes, a rifle slung over his shoulder.
However, Edwards would say only that "we're very close to making a positive ID on him."
"We just got to catch this guy," he said.
Edwards has been working the case since 2007. He didn't return a call seeking comment Tuesday evening.
Authorities say Knapp has eluded capture for more than five years, breaking into remote cabins in winter, living in luxury off hot food, alcohol and coffee before stealing provisions and vanishing into the woods with guns and supplies.
Investigators have chased dozens of leads, to no avail.
In recent weeks, it took detectives an entire day to reach a remote cabin after getting a report that lights had been seen on inside overnight. It turned out they were solar-powered lights on the porch, and the cabin was empty – another dead-end.
Their break came in January with the fingerprint match.
While there have been no violent confrontations, detectives have called him a time bomb. Over the years, he has left some cabins tidy and clean, while others he has practically destroyed, even defecating in a pan on the floor in one home.
Lately he has been leaving the cabins in disarray and riddled with bullets after defacing religious icons, and a recent note left behind in one cabin warned, "Get off my mountain."
In the Jan. 27 court filing, authorities said Knapp had left behind even more threatening notes aimed at law enforcement.
"Hey Sheriff ... Gonna put you in the ground!" read one note.
Cabin owners are panicked. Many said they were carrying their owns guns and had grown to wonder who might be sleeping in their beds during winter.
"He could stand in the trees and pop you off and no one would know who killed you," cabin owner Bruce Stucki said last week.
When alerted of the news Tuesday, a relieved Stucki simply said, "Wow."
"That's wonderful that they know him," he said. "Now they need to get him in custody."
From the beginning, the suspect's lore grew, leading to theories that he might have been two separate men on the FBI's Most Wanted List or possibly a castaway from the nearby compounds of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the polygamous sect run by jailed leader Warren Jeffs.
Early on, investigators thought his unattended summer camps they came across during their search were left behind by "doomsday" believers preparing for some sort of apocalypse because of the remote locations and supplies like dozens of guns, radios, batteries, dehydrated food and camping gear.
They now have a name, but the man remains in the mist.
"He's scaring the daylights out of cabin owners. Now everyone's packing guns," said Jud Hendrickson, a 62-year-old mortgage adviser from nearby St. George who keeps a trailer in the area. "We feel like we're being subject to terrorism by this guy."

6 comments:

  1. This guy is a criminal, pure and simple. He does what criminals do: anything they want in spite of laws.

    I am not a criminal. I am not delusional. I do not seek violence and I do not wish for any. Most importantly, I do not cause any violence to citizens. And it shouldn't come as any surprise that I am like the overwhelming majority of other armed citizens. To say it bluntly, armed citizens are not the scourge that dog gone believes them to be.

    But don't just take my word for it. Look at the data available. Concealed carry license holders in the U.S. commit about 1 murder per state, per year. That's it. And armed citizens accidentally shoot and kill a few hundred citizens per year. Finally, criminals use firearms to kill about 900 citizens per year. (That last number by the way includes the 50 or so people that concealed carry license holders kill every year.)

    So all the cries for gun control are to eliminate some fraction of the roughly 1,500 annual homicides and accidental deaths of citizens from firearms.

    While those deaths are regrettable, what would be even more regrettable would be leaving virtually all citizens defenseless against the criminal element ... having no option to effectively defend themselves from the 1.2 million violent crimes that occurred in 2010.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The problem is that guns are lethal weapons, they are used to kill and injure and intimidate other people.

      They belong in the hands of law enforcement and the military. You, not so much. Given the lax approach of the private gun owners to safety and to keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, it makes sense to err on the side of NOT having guns in YOUR hands.

      Delete
    2. But you didn't address his point: The rate of gun crime is too low to justify taking guns away from millions of lawful gun owners.

      Delete
    3. Greg you are correct. And it shows that gun control isn't about making citizens safer.

      The simple fact is that criminals use firearms to shoot citizens about 4,500 times per year, with about 900 of those shootings causing the death of the citizen. Now contrast that with how many times citizens defend themselves with firearms every year ... and the number of crimes that would have happened but never happened because criminals thought citizens were armed.

      If more citizens were armed as they went about their business, there would be even fewer citizens who were physically injured during violent crimes. For anyone who wants to scoff at that idea, I keep asking them to point out how many murders, robberies, and rapes have occurred at shooting ranges or police stations.

      And then dog gone asserted that firearm owners are lax about safety. Something like 80 million citizens own firearms. And every year there are something like 1000 accidental shootings that result in injury or death. When 80 million people have an accident rate on the order of 0.001%, that hardly sounds like those people have a lax approach to safety.

      But like I said, gun control isn't about making citizens safer.

      Delete
    4. Capn, You totally lost me with those numbers.

      I believe guns do more harm than good. All the twisting and double-talking, of which I've read my share, fails to convince me otherwise.

      Delete
  2. I don't see any problem if a citizen uses a gun to "intimidate" a criminal.

    ReplyDelete