It wouldn’t matter. The cars would be stolen and supposedly not traceable to the thieves. And if there was a cell phone blocker on, they wouldn’t be able to report it until after the robbery was over anyway.
And as far as the getaway car, I’m assuming that they would switch cars fairly quickly after driving away.
The main problem with this, at least here in Texas, is that some significant percentage of the stopped drivers are going to start shooting back as soon as they see armed robbers approaching their vehicles.
Yeah, you wouldn’t be able to pull this off in a state like Texas where many people are armed. You’d have to do it in a state like California, Massachusetts or New York where guns are less common, especially guns in cars.
Another thought about this. A good potential location for this would be one of those “fly-over” ramps. It would prevent people from fleeing to the side and would eliminate interference from opposite direction traffic.
Yep. I’m shocked that we don’t see shopping malls, movie theaters or sports stadiums as frequent terror targets.
I’m also shocked at how infrequent collisions are on the ski slopes. Just watching all those wankers who shouldn’t be on the slopes in the first place, it seems like collisions should happen about once every few seconds.
Speaking of freeways…dropping heavy things off of overcrossings…
There actually was a brief vogue for this in Los Angeles, not too long ago. A couple of drivers were killed. It’s trivially easy to do, and very easy to get away without being caught.
And…say, these things don’t all have to be bad! I’m surprised more people don’t pick up bits of litter and trash when they’re walking. I make a point of it; every time I got for a walk, I pick up at least one piece of litter. I’m (slightly) surprised more people don’t do this.
Me too. I was the stereotypical good girl, straight As, stayed at home and never got into trouble, and I still had a recurring fantasy that my hand would turn into a gun so I could shoot my bully. (Then it would turn back into my hand so I couldn’t be caught. )
Terrorists could do a lot of harm and terrorising if they didn’t only go for symbolic targets.
Setting forests on fire, infecting livestock with foot and mouth disease, sabotaging electrical substations/sewage treatment plants, parking cars on traintracks. Are all easy and damaging.
Indiscriminate mobile sniper attacks, poisoning at baby-formula factories and bombs at multiple polling stations, would be very terrorising.
Granted that’d make everyone hate them, but ISIS is doing a good enough job of that anyway, when Al-fucking-Quida says your methods are too extreme, you really need a long hard think.
I really doubt that the average person has $200 on them. Or that additional things stolen would amount to anything near $2000. Especially trying to sell or pawn it.
We had to get locking mailboxes in central locations on our streets in Gainesville, FL; seems that, at the time this happened, twenty some years ago, the local power company, “GRU” (Gainesville Regional Utilities) would send out power bills, then people would use their clearly marked envelopes to return a check to them, often made out to ‘GRU’…for a time, someone raided all the boxes with flags up during the middle of the night, looking for such checks, and, when they found them, added a few letters, like "chek’, or ‘ely’ or anything to make it seem like a surname, then deposited it in their previously arranged bank account…withdrawing the funds before GRU sent out the next bill.
Another thing that surprises me came up yesterday at work.
There are times at a college that we need to contact someone’s parents, often it’s a negative situation, like a serious disciplinary issue or even legal problem. When this happens, we go to the student’s record and get the contact information for the parents. What amazes me is that the student maintains this record, so let’s say the parent has moved or has a new phone number, the student is supposed to update that. But there is NOTHING stopping a student from doing an update that puts in a fake number, or conveniently uses the student’s best friend’s contact information instead of the parents. It amazes me how infrequently this happens (especially given the outrage that often results from contacting the parents).
Traffic seems to be a common theme in this thread, personally I’m amazed that there aren’t more head-on collisions given the number of people who seem to think its just fine to overtake when coming up to/over the blind crest of a hill on the B-roads we have around here…and if its a corner it seems to be even more attractive to them.
I think it’s because people figure that it’s not their own litter, so they don’t want to touch it, or they don’t like the idea of touching what they consider to be garbage, even if it’s not particularly dirty.
I’m somewhat surprised people who smoke inside our metro (subway, underground) stations don’t get caught more often. Though since they’re usually homeless people, maybe the police feel sorry for them and figure it’s not much use to get after them.
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