Welcome To The Job

There are times when a cop wishes that his badge is literally as big as a garbage can lid. Two days ago Officer Stuart Ingram of the NYPD experienced this.

NEW YORK — An emotionally disturbed man driving his car on a sidewalk nearly ran over a nun on Thursday before trying to stab a rookie policeman in the chest and breaking his knife on the officer's shield, authorities said.

Talk about the Provenance of G-d. Most of the time an attack like this would have the blade slide off the metal and go into the officer's soft body armor. Bullet resistent ballistic panels are not meant to stop knives and do a very poor job of protecting against puncture wounds.

The unusual string of events started in Queens about 5 p.m., when the man left the scene of an accident and started barreling down a sidewalk where the nun was walking, police said.

Another man pushed the nun out of the way of the oncoming car, which struck a tree and a wall before coming to a stop, the New York Police Department said. When the driver tried to run away, two people tried to stop him, but they backed off when he threatened them with a kitchen knife, police said.

Much more of this and you'll be fingerprinted and issued a license before you can pick up a set of Ginsu's.

Two responding officers confronted the driver, who then tried to stab one of them, Stuart Ingram, in the chest, police said. Ingram said later he told the man repeatedly to drop the knife but the man lunged at him with it. He said the knife hit his badge and shattered.

Ingram said he struck the man with an expandable baton and, with the help of a civilian, subdued him. "That's when we apprehended him," Ingram said coolly at a news conference.

My personal preference would be that Officer Ingram struck him multiple times with a .45 caliber hollow point, but hey, I wasn't there. BC, Imperial Torturer of the Rott also recommends the .45 Goblin Stopper. But in any respect, we're all thankful that Officer Ingram walked away from this encounter. Nice grab!

There seems to be a bit more knife work out there. From the UCR reports I know that there has been a small uptick in the percentage of aggravated assaults committed with a knife, from 18.6% of all agg. assaults in 2004 to 18.9% in 2005. In 2006 the preliminary UCR for NY State shows a 3% increase for agg. assault, but no weapon distribution as of yet.

My read on this is that people have been offing one another since Cain slew Abel. And you can bet your ass he didn't use a Glock.

If a gun is not available, a knife will do. If there isn't a knife handy then a baseball bat certainly is useful. If the sporting goods store isn't open yet, then that broken chunk of cinder block will do the trick. No construction materials laying about? Well, go to it with fang and claw.

Weapons are only instruments that reflect human intent. As long as human intent is evil, the laws that ban one type of weapon or another are useless. Virtually anything can be used as a weapon or dangerous instrument. Sugar-free or not, even a big bowl of strawberry jello (I prefer raspberry) is deadly if you cram someone's head in it.