Aaron Martin was followed to a gun show and arrested on the way home. (Photo: NY Post)
A veteran New York firefighter has been charged with multiple gun-related crimes after an interstate task force followed him to a gun show in Pennsylvania and arrested him as he was driving home.
The sting is the first publicized action of the new Interstate Task Force on Illegal Guns, a collaboration between state and federal law enforcement agencies announced by New York Governor Kathy Hochul last month.
When the task force was announced, it was unclear whether agents would be targeting large criminal networks of gun runners or individual gun owners. Now, we know.
Aaron B. Martin, 49, who works for FDNY’s elite Rescue 4 in Queens, was charged with multiple crimes, including felony possession of an “assault weapon,” according to the New York Post.
It’s unclear why agents targeted Martin, but the Post reports that a surveillance team followed Martin to the “Oaks Extravaganza” gun show at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center on Feb. 13.
There, they allegedly observed him purchase two Polymer80 receivers, two “high-capacity magazines,” holding more than ten rounds, and one Sipahi semi-automatic 12-gauge shotgun.
Agents followed Martin until he crossed the border into New York City and pulled him over in Howard Beach, Queens, on Belt Parkway.
At the time, Martin admitted to purchasing the shotgun but denied possessing any other firearms or gun parts, according to police. Law enforcement seized the gun and parts along with a set of brass knuckles.
Martin does not possess a license to own a shotgun, which is a requirement in New York City.
Martin has been suspended from the Fire Department of New York for 28 days without pay. Along with serving for Rescue 4, he is a chief on the Roosevelt, L.I., volunteer fire department.
Law enforcement officials have not said why Martin was targeted, and he does not appear to have a criminal history.
When Gov. Hochul announced the task force, she characterized it as a way to stop the “flow of illegal guns.”
“We have a moral obligation to do everything we can to fight the scourge of illegal guns on our streets,” she said. “Too many lives have been lost because of illegal firearms that should never have been on our streets. By convening law enforcement officials from across the region, we can share intelligence and strategies that stem the flow of illegal guns and keep New Yorkers safe.”
The task force brings together ATF agents along with law enforcement agencies from New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, Ohio, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New Hampshire.
In the early 1930s, as the Great Depression ravaged the world and fascism rose in Europe, the Western provinces of Australia faced their own existential crisis- the Great Emu War.
Following the conclusion of the First World War, the Australian government wanted to promote agricultural development in their Western provinces. Their solution was to provide land to discharged veterans to take up farming in the agriculturally marginal region.
What they didn’t know was that one of the world’s fiercest fighting forces lay in wait: some 20,000 emus.
Emus are an intricate part of Australian identity. The flightless birds feature prominently in Aboriginal mythology and culture, and appear on the national coat of arms. The birds stand as tall as six feet high and are capable of reaching 31 miles-per-hour running speed.
If it weren’t for their fluffy feathered coat, it wouldn’t come as a shock to believe you had just seen a velociraptor sprinting through the Australian outback.
In 1929, with the world gripped by the Great Depression, the Australian government started to encourage wheat cultivation with the promise of subsidies.
The policy proved disastrous as wheat prices continued to fall, and the government never came through on its promise of subsidies.
By 1932, the situation was deteriorating quickly in Australia’s west. The farmers who had been sent west, and were then tasked with harvesting their relatively worthless wheat crop that the government had failed to subsidize, were now being ravaged by a sudden influx of emus.
How it Started
A group of former soldiers from the afflicted areas met with Sir George Pearce, the Minister of Defense, and requested the deployment of machine guns to subdue the emu threat. Pearce was more than willing to oblige.
A secession movement was brewing in Western Australia, and sending military support to defeat the invading emus was seen as a good way to ease tensions.
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Pearce was so confident in the War’s success that he even sent a cinematographer to document the Australian army’s glorious victory over the barbarous native emus.
Major G. P. W. Meredith oversaw the massive military campaign that consisted of himself, two soldiers, two Lewis guns, and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Military involvement was scheduled to begin in October of 1932, and it’s very likely they held the belief that the war would be over by Christmas.
However, the grand expedition was halted by a rainy period that pushed their campaign back to November of that year.
Major Meredith’s first encounter with the emu proved to be instructive. Following up on a sighting of 50 emus, Meredith, his men, and some local settlers staged a brilliant attack on the unsuspecting birds.
The settlers would herd the birds into the Lewis guns’ range, and Meredith’s men would unleash a surprise attack. The plan was perfect, except for one problem: the birds couldn’t be herded.
The emus split up in small groups as they ran away, and only after the second round of gunfire could Meredith proudly proclaim that “a number” of emus had been slain.
Meredith had learned two things from his first encounter with the mighty emu: that treating the descendants of the dinosaurs like sheep was a foolish proposition, and that he needed to be close to them to have a chance.
A few days later, he would have his chance to assert Australia’s military might over their fiercest rival.
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Meredith and his gunners set up camp near a dam. The men lay in wait as a group of 1,000 emus headed towards their fortifications. This time they knew they needed to wait for the enemy to be close.
They needed to stare death in its eyes and then unleash the fury of man’s military sophistication upon their enemy.
As the emus came into range, Meredith gave his men the signal and the gunners unleashed hell upon the flock. Their ambush had been a success.
A dozen devilish emus dropped to their deaths. With each passing burst from the Lewis gun, victory inched closer.
But then, the Lewis gun had jammed, the remaining emus scattered, and Meredith’s sure victory had been undone by the sophistication of man’s finest military technology.
As one observer noted, “The emus have proved that they are not so stupid as they are usually considered to be.”
The campaign did not improve for Meredith in the subsequent days. The emus were able to evade his tactics even as he learned more and more about Australia’s most formidable foe.
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Every pack of emus has a leader “who keeps watch while fellows busy themselves with the wheat.” This one brave emu would raise the alarm and wait for the flock to escape into the scrub.
The birds “travelling at nearly 30 miles an hour and bearing more feathers than flesh, the birds make almost impossible targets.”
Meredith knew what his problem was. The emu was simply too fast for his stationary Lewis gunners. So, he did the only sensible thing available to him and mounted his Lewis gun onto a truck in a proto-”Mad Max”-ian attempt to subdue the emu.
The plan was sure to succeed. No bird could outrun both a truck and bullet. The brilliant tactic was short-lived. The emus could maintain their distance from the encumbered truck, and the uneven terrain made aiming the gun nearly impossible.
How it Ended
After six days 2,500 rounds had been fired. The number of birds killed remains uncertain, with some estimates as low as 50 and some as high as 500. At this point, the local press was less than impressed by Meredith’s campaign and the poor publicity caused Pearce to withdraw his troops.
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However, Meredith was thoroughly impressed by the emu, stating, “If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds, it would face any army in the world.
They can face machine-guns with the invulnerability of tanks. They are like Zulus whom even dum-dum bullets could not stop.”
The military impasse did not last long. With the emus continuing to ravage the farmers’ crop, Meredith was once again deployed. With reports that the first campaign had successfully managed to slay 300 emus, the second offensive was sure to benefit from the first’s failure.
From November 13th to December 10th of 1932, Meredith perfected the art of slaying the emu. By his estimations, he killed 986 emus with 9,860 rounds, and that 2,500 more emus died from their wounds.
Meredith’s victory of the emu did not last long. Farmers once again requested military assistance in 1934, 1943, and 1948, but the military turned them down each time. In fact, in 1943 the farmers requested that bombs be used to hold the mighty emu at bay.
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Australia has come up with less lethal ways to contain the emu. The expansion and development of fencing have helped to protect crops.
On September 26, my family went to dinner to celebrate my mother-in-law’s birthday. We brought our nephew Joshua—her grandson—along with us. We had a nice meal then stopped for dessert. When I got home, I tweeted about the conversation I had with him. Three weeks later, he was dead. As one can imagine, the family is devastated; a happy, healthy young man struck down in the prime of his life. That pain is heightened by the way he died.
Joshua was riding his motorcycle with a friend on Sunday night. His friend—riding in the wrong direction—hit a car and left the scene. Joshua and the driver of the car got into a verbal altercation. The driver got out of the car and the two began to fight. Joshua rode away on his motorcycle. The driver then got back behind the wheel of his car and intentionally mowed my nephew down. While the investigation is ongoing, there is video of the altercation.
How could this happen? Why was Joshua’s friend riding in the wrong direction? Why did Joshua get into an argument with the driver of the car over an accident he wasn’t involved in? How did a minor fender bender lead to a fight and more importantly, what made the driver lose control and run a man down in cold blood? While the car was the tool used to end his life, Joshua was killed by America’s greatest crisis, one that most of us can see but the media rarely talks about. It is a cultural crisis.
Dealing with this crisis is difficult, but we are not even discussing the actual problem. There is no shortage of talk of crises, but the talk never seems to be about the things that are really doing us harm. There is incessant talk about the COVID-19 pandemic. While it is important, much of the conversation is centered around government power and how one segment of the population is “killing” the rest of us. Racism is another major crisis in the discourse. Recently, NYC joined Chicago, Milwaukee, Louisville, and other cities in declaring racism a “public health crisis.” No word on how they are going to fix racism, though they are removing a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the city council chambers.
Something deeper underlies all these phenomena: a roiling collapse in how we behave and what we tolerate—a crisis of conscience. We have lost a common sense of decency. We are quick to virtue signal about “justice” in the virtual world but spend the greater part of our day ignoring those who are truly in need. Recently a woman was raped on a train in Philadelphia. People held up their phones, but no one tried to help or even—with phone in hand—bothered to call 911.
We are increasingly narcissistic. We believe the world was made to bend to our will. When we are wronged—or we perceive we were—we will settle for nothing less than total social annihilation of the wrongdoer. We believe we have the right to decide if they can keep their career or be ostracized from society.
We are weak. We cannot be bothered to deal with things we do not like so anything that we deem offensive must be removed from society. However, if we like something, we should have the right to enjoy it, even if it offends others. This has led to an entertainment industry replete with debauchery, and if you happen to find that offensive, well too bad—that’s your problem.
Finally, we are losing our religion, without which it is difficult, if not impossible, for a society to maintain a collective moral standard. Standards must have foundations, and our once overwhelmingly shared Biblical foundations are crumbling away. As Charles Murray—an agnostic—told Jonathan Van Maren, “Without religion, there was simply no ‘intrinsic motivation’ for people to behave morally — and no definition for what constitutes moral behavior in the first place.”
As President Eisenhower famously put it, “our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” As a fast-growing share of Americans turn with worshipful devotion to post-Biblical creeds, that proposition is now being tested.
The unfolding crisis of conscience has given us a culture where people do what they want with little regard for consequences, which they regard as an injustice. Others assume that certain groups do not have the capacity to control their behavior, and thus hold them to a lower standard—a kind of sub-humanity.
We are living in the safest, wealthiest, most technologically advanced society with more opportunities than any society in human history and yet, by all logical accounts, we are failing at being decent human beings. I do not know what, if anything, will turn the tide, but I hope that we can get away from the things we disagree on long enough to see the humanity in our adversaries. If the guy driving that car saw my nephew as a human of value, odds are he would not have been able to take his life.
I write this as the family prepares for Joshua’s funeral. I don’t expect the world to stop at one untimely death, though we’ve known it to happen with the “right” kind of death. I do hope people will take a moment to consider that there are issues we face that are greater than the things that get the most attention, and that the physical, emotional, and economic toll this cultural crisis has on our society will only get worse if we continue to ignore it.
PITTSBURGH – The parents of a Pennsylvania 13-year-old accused of shooting and killing his 5-year-old brother in November are now facing charges themselves.
Sara Gerwig and Thomas Wolfe are each charged with endangering the welfare of a child following the death of Connor Wolfe in Penn Hills on Nov. 22, according to a criminal complaint the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office provided Tuesday to Fox News Digital.
“What happened in Penn Hills was an intentional act that resulted in the tragic death of a 5-year-old,” the Attorney’s Office said earlier this month. “The 13-year-old was charged as an adult because Pennsylvania law does not permit a charge of criminal homicide to be filed directly in juvenile court.”
The suspect, who is also facing a charge of possession of a firearm by a minor, told investigators he had shot Connor Wolfe after getting angry at his siblings for jumping on a bed inside their home, WTAE reports.
The teen said he went into his father’s bedroom to get his father’s firearm in order to scare his siblings, the station added. But when the 13-year-old pointed the gun at Wolfe and pulled the trigger, he said he believed the safety was on, according to WTAE.
Wolfe was struck in the head and later died at a local hospital.
The criminal complaint obtained by Fox News Digital states that the teenager told investigators that the gun used in the shooting was “left out in the master bedroom” and that “he knew the handgun was there, because Thomas Wolfe always leaves his handgun out.”
“While interviewing Thomas Wolfe and Sara Gerwig separately, Thomas admitted that he left his handgun on top of his gun safe in their 1st floor master bedroom. Thomas stated that the handgun is always loaded, with a live round in the chamber,” the complaint continued. “Thomas uses the handgun as his every day carry gun, when he leaves the house.”
“Sara stated that she saw the handgun sitting on top of the safe since Saturday November 20th, 2021,” days prior to the shooting, the complaint also said.
