So these jerks did not know what they were doing. Imagine not casing a museum properly before stealing two incredibly famous paintings. I’ve also seen a diagram of the museum on the BBC news site and see it’s really small, but I still find it hard to imagine a place where you can snatch a famous painting and be out on the street in 30 seconds. Oh well.
LOL at the velvet rope comments; what I meant, of course, was that a rope like that usually marks the boundaries of an electronic no-go zone that sets off an alarm that attracts the attention of a guard. At least it sure does in the Met; even without any ropes an alarm goes off if you lean too close to a Rembrandt or Sargent.
And for an American, I’m pretty pro-gun-control, and was not suggesting that anybody start a gun battle in the museum, but I’m having trouble understanding exactly what the security was supposed to be there. No doors locking, no vaults for the paintings, no non-lethal force training for the guards, no locks for the outer doors, no security codes, etc., for a museum housing world-famous paintings, with a copy of the most famous having been stolen a few years before?
I read about it in Scams, Scandals, and Skulduggery: A Selection of the World’s Most Outrageous Frauds by Andreas Schroeder. This book, along with its sequels Cheats, Charlatans, and Chicanery: More Outrageous Tales of Skullduggery and Fakes, Frauds, and Flimflammery: Even More of the World’s Most Outrageous Scams tells great stories about subjects like the Duke of Arizona, the Grand Principality of Outer Baldonia, Emperor Norton, the Tichborne Claimant, Elmyr de Hory, the Nice bank robbery, Dagobert Duck, the Hitler Diaries, D.B. Cooper, and the writing of “Naked Came the Stranger”. I highly recommend all three.
… no hidden tripwire lasers, no iron cages that fall from the ceiling, no pressure-sensitive floors wired to the poison dart guns in the walls, no 10-foot-diameter stone balls that roll down the tunnel after the would-be thief … not even a last-ditch “scorched earth” atomic bomb wired to go off when the weight of the painting was removed from the wall! Hmph! Some security.
The ebay link isn’t working for me. Someone pretending to sell one or both of the paintings, I assume?
Someone I know who went to see the Scream remarked that people tended not to notice it, because it’s very small and there are what he considered better works right next to it.
The treatment of the paintings is plain stupid. They understood that these were valuable works, yet they’re treating them with less care than most people treat their furniture.
The security’s surprising since I’m used to, say, the Met, where the guards follow you around and yell at you if you look too closely at the paintings. A friend of mine in Boston was yelled at by a guard for sketching a painting. A gunfight would have been dangerous for all involved as well as the works, but you’d think they’d have been followed or something, especially when they seem to be complete idiots.
Well, I’m sure I’ll be accused of bloodthirstiness, but couldn’t this same argument be made about virtually anything? Is a car worth shooting people over? Is money worth shooting people over? Are your valuables in your own home worth shooting people over? Is anything short of human safety worth shooting people over?
Yes.
Why? Because it maintains order. If people could just steal anything they wanted, willy-nilly and with no chance of harmful consequence short of being apprehended by an onsite police officer, the world would be overrun with people stealing other peoples’ valuables and chaos would reign.
And besides, armed guards are a deterrant! How many bank robberies do you think would take place if banks were known to have unarmed guards?
Of course, when someone breaks into your home you generally don’t know WHY they’re there, so shooting them is both to protect your valuables and human life. People who break into a museum are there to steal the art.
Indeed, but what if they had decided to kill witnesses? What if they became power drunk and decided to shoot someone just because they didn’t like the way he/she was looking at them? What if they panicked and just started shooting for no reason in particular?
I just do not understand the thinking of people who feel it’s better to be unarmed, helpless and totally at the mercy of armed intruders. What possible advantage can there be in total helplessness?
I’d have to agree with the last part. We have a “back to the wall” law in my state. I can shoot in intruder in my home because I fear for my life and my back is to the wall; shooting him is my only recourse to survive. I cannot shoot him for stealing my stuff.
I’m pretty sure that banks DO have unarmed guards. At this side of the Big Puddle anyway. Admittedly, I don’t know how bank robbery figures (U.K.) co,pare to bank roberry figures (U.S.A.)… but I’m not going to leap into suggesting armed guards everywhere jsut yet.
