Scrambled or Poached

Hopefully both, for these bastards

An injured California gray whale was swimming out to sea Saturday after being shot with a machine gun off the western tip of Washington State, officials said.

Coast Guard Petty Officer Kelly Parker said five people believed to be members of the Makah Tribe shot and harpooned the whale Saturday morning. The extent of the whale’s injuries were not immediately known.

Tribe members were being held by the Coast Guard but had not been charged, said Mark Oswell, a spokesman for the law enforcement arm of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

A preliminary report said the whale was shot with a .50-caliber machine gun, Oswell said.

While the tribes are their own nations and are allowed to own full-auto weaponry, unlike us non-tribal Washington citizens, the gun they used was not a “Machine Gun” as is described in the article. the gun the tribe owns is a Barrett 82M1 (aka: M107 heavy rifle) still rather impressive, but it’s not a mounted M2.

Coast Guard officials created a 1,000-yard safety zone around the injured whale, which was shot about a mile east of Neah Bay in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The whale had begun heading to sea Saturday afternoon, Oswell said.

Although the tribe has subsistence fishing rights to kill whales, Oswell said preliminary information indicates the whale may have been shot illegally.

“We allow native hunts for cultural purposes. However, this does not appear to be of that nature so far,” he said.

The Makah Tribe has more than 1,000 members and is based in Neah Bay.

A call to tribal officials was not immediately returned on Saturday. Tribal Chairman Ben Johnson told The Seattle Times that the tribe has been seeking an exemption from the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act so that it could take up to five gray whales per year. However, Johnson said the tribe had not yet secured that exemption for a new hunt.

The 82A1 was the rifle they used to hunt their “legally permitted” whale, but the tribe was not behind this poach and it’s participants had to bring their own firepower

The hunt started without a hitch: Less than a mile out, the men spotted a gray whale. But Johnson, 54, and the rest of the crew decided they were too close to shore to fire the .460-caliber rifle they’d brought.

Around 9:30, the crew saw another whale. This one, about 40 feet long, surfaced and came to the two boats.

“It chose us,” Johnson said.

If it had proved to be the same one that the tribe owns, it would have had some serious legal ramifications for the tribe themselves since it is owned by the tribe and not an individual and whomever let these bozos get a hold of it to go out and poach a whale would have probably been held very responsible for their oversight.

This jackass Johnson says he is not sorry in the least bit, he even says he is “kind of proud”. This old puke was even wearing his “.50 Caliber Shooting Club” jacket when he was arrested, so expect the gun bigots to possibly zero in on that. “Rifles powerful enough to shoot down jubo-jets and kill whales” will echo from the VPC halls.

And don’t believe a word of the “substinance fishing right to kill whales” bullshit. the one they shot last time was left to rot and it’s corpse had to be cleared off the beach my the state at taxpayer’s expense.

The fine to each of the guys on the water could be as high as $20,000, but that is not nearly enough for a poacher. Shot on sight and hung from trees bearing placards stating their offense is the only just punishment for that level of scum.

——————-

On a side note, but still related; in the days after AG Gonzalez’s resignation, Slade Gorton, former Washington Senator and former Washington State AG, had his name raised for the appointment.

While he wouldn’t be my first choice, since he was never a firm 2A supporter, definitely not a Reno but not an Ashcroft either, after seeing the reaction from the tribes around the state, my support for him was put on steroids. They don’t like him because during the 70’s and 80’s when the fed wasn’t prosecuting for the tribe’s violations of their treaties, Gorton tried to do it via the state courts.

Their hate of the man bolstered my respect for him. Yeah, it’s not right, but I like it.