This is a fascinating piece, at the New York Times, "
The Ice Pick Seems Antiquated, but It Still Shows Up on the Police Blotter":
The young man staggered down a city street as blood flowed from a puncture wound. The weapon used in the steely attack — an ice pick — was sticking out of his lower back.
The scene was reminiscent of an era in the 1930s and ’40s when members of a notorious Brooklyn murder syndicate left a trail of bodies riddled with ice-pick holes. This attack, however, was set in modern-day New York City, specifically, on Aug. 21, at 4:20 p.m. in the Norwood section of the Bronx.
While guns top the list of weapons used in violent assaults, every so often, a crime is committed with a weapon that is suggestive of a different era and seems mystifyingly out of place in the New York City of today.
One such weapon is the ice pick — often associated with the 1940 murder of the Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky: He was killed with an ice pick’s cousin, an ice ax, while he was in exile in Mexico, by an assassin who, acting on the orders of Joseph Stalin, crept up behind Trotsky and slammed the ice ax into his skull.
“There is no prohibition right now against carrying an ice pick in New York City,” said City Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., chairman of the Public Safety Committee, “which is interesting because I don’t know of any legitimate use for an ice pick.”
“I think the ice pick went the way of the milkman,” he added.
Not so. Plenty of hardware stores around the city still sell ice picks.
At NHS Hardware on Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx, a worker, Jose Santana, strode toward the back of the store and grabbed a $3.89 model, whose wrapper said that it was of “professional quality” and “high carbon steel,” from a display of ice picks hanging from a peg.
“There are some weird people looking for this,” Mr. Santana said with a hint of a smile. “It’s weird, no?” ....
The ice pick never completely disappeared as an implement of crime, but it seems to have rebounded as one recently.
Late last year, a Bronx man, John Martinez, was dubbed the Ice-Pick Bandit by prosecutors and the news media after being caught and convicted of a series of robberies and burglaries. On separate occasions, Mr. Martinez brandished an ice pick and terrorized six women, stealing cash, jewelry and cellphones. In one case, Mr. Martinez threatened to stab a woman’s child if she did not hand over more cash.
The recent attack in the Bronx unfolded when an unidentified man, apparently lying in wait inside a parked car, ambushed two young men, ages 19 and 20, on the corner of East 208th Street and Perry Avenue. A witness described seeing one victim with the ice pick jutting out of his back.
The attacks were not fatal, though one victim was seriously injured. A police spokesman said the motive remained unknown and no arrests had been made.
Under the city’s consumer-protection and public-safety laws, it is illegal to sell a box cutter to anyone under 21. Retailers who break the law face a maximum $500 fine for each violation.
When asked whether the law also applied to ice picks, Mr. Vallone said it did not — and then got to thinking: Why not? The question prompted him to draw up a bill that would amend the law to include a ban on the sale of ice picks to anyone under 21. He said his committee would probably hold a public hearing on the proposal in the next several months.
“I would entertain expanding it further, banning all public possession, once we learn, during the hearing process, whether there are any legitimate uses in this day and age for an ice pick,” he said in a phone interview on Wednesday.
Mann Rosa, 32, who lives on Perry Avenue about a block from the scene of the recent attack, said ice picks were back in vogue among street gangs all across the city.
“The ice pick, from what I know, is the new thing,” Mr. Rosa said, noting how easy it was to buy and conceal. “It’s definitely the new wave.”
That's gotta be a gnarly way to go, like Trotsky, getting hammered in the back of the skull with an ice-axe.
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