From the "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?" files, we have a story of a gun hoarder killing himself in Putnam County, about fifty miles north of New York City. The guy, described as a survivalist (weird, I thought survivalism was about, you know, surviving). The guy had so much ordnance that a crew from Fort Drum, up by the Canadian border, had to travel downstate to remove the explosives in as safe a manner as possible.
Thankfully, this guy had the good taste to kill himself in private, rather than going on a murderous rampage. Just the thought of what the guy could have done on a crowded New York City street with all of those explosives is making my toenails curl. One odd little detail in the story is that d00d had a non-functional Saladin armored reconnaissance vehicle in his yard.
Oddly enough, the last time an incident similar to this occurred in that neck of the woods, it involved the son (from a former marriage) of the late husband of a woman I had been working with for about two weeks. Seems the kid broke into her house to steal some guns that he knew his father had left behind. When the police investigated the incident, they found a huge arsenal that my co-worker was unaware of. It was odd, having the name of the nice lady in the cubicle across from mine, a woman I'd only met a couple of weeks before, appear in the paper.
It's odd what sort of horrors can lurk behind innocent-seeming suburban walls.
No less a visionary than Hunter Thompson got to a very real truth about the human condition when he famously wrote:
ReplyDelete“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.
Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”
As it is with drugs, so it is with cars, beanie babies, salt shakers and, yes, firearms. The more you own, the more you want, and the obsession becomes filling in specific "holes" in the collection, based on history, functionality, manufacturer or purpose. Have a Remington 700 in .308? Great. No I want one in .300 Win Mag. A 4" Model 19? What about a 6"? An AR AND an AK? OK, now you just need an FNFAL, an SA80, a Steyr AUG and, oh yeah, a new model AK, the 74.
It doesn't always mean anything - other than the person is a human...
Don't forget government spying.
ReplyDeleteIf only we could spy on a few more people...
~
The suburbs are the worst.
ReplyDeleteExcept for every other place.
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