What exactly does this mean? "Attempted to point it?"
If it was unloaded, why would he point it at him?
I'm guessing that he grabbed it to take with him, and the chief, being a East Coast authoritarian kind of guy, decided to claim that he "attempted to point it" at him because 1) he resisted leaving his house, and 2) he doesn't like "civilians" (hint: police officers are civilians, too) owning firearms.
When Fire Chief John Feeny ordered Arthur L. Arford to leave his smoky home in a residential area of Colonial Court about 4 p.m. to make way for firefighters, Arford told Feeny the department had no right to force him off his property, said Detective Joseph McGovern.
It was the FIRE CHIEF, not the police chief. Firefighters are unarmed.
Keep an eye on them. They aren't conservatives. They are just socialist trolls.
It seems that NJ firefighters can moonlight as psychics.
I'd be curious to know more about the M1, though. If it was an original gas trap version or a WWII Winchester or an original Guadalcanal Garand, he'd be a fool not to grab it and get it away from the water and flames. Same thing with an M1C or D or National Match M1.
Now, was he a deranged malcontent or a panicked collector? Hard to tell from the info here, but that sure doesn't stop some FReepers from assuming facts not in evidence.
Perhaps the Fire Chief is playing along with the cops who tackled the guy *before* he could threaten anyone with that *unloaded* rifle. It was a dumb thing for the guy to do, touching a firearm with cops nearby, but that does not necessarily translate into "threatened the fire chief".
In any case, once the cops followed the firemen into that house, once they saw all those guns, there was no way that all that hardware was *not* going to be confiscated, pending an investigation at minimum.