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Grannies Don't Need Guns
"I immediately brushed my teeth,” she said.
Would be victim number one, a 72-year-old Seaside, Calif., woman who was strolling on a sidewalk by US-50 in South Lake Tahoe when a teenage mugger ran up, grabbed her purse, and yanked. Then he yanked again. No dice.
A third determined tug finally got Granny mad, so she pulled the purse away, swung it by the strap, and belted him in the face with it. The stunned mugger was last seen high-tailing into the Sierra sunset.
The maybe-armed stickup man probably didn’t know he was getting the real Ginger when he walked into Ginger’s Jar, a gift and antique shop in Carson City, Nev.
Ginger “Ginny” Parkinson, a grandmother and recovering stroke victim, must have looked like easy pickings as she hobbled about her shop, feather dusting knick-knacks.
The suspect, described as “big and scruffy,” suddenly and confidently sauntered in, pulled the old “poking the pistol in the coat pocket” trick, and announced to Ginny she was being held up. And that’s when his plan went straight to hell.
First, Ginny emptied half a can of pepper spray into Scruffy’s face, blinding him. Then, when he grabbed for her over the counter, she planted her (real, not store-bought) teeth in his wrist and started gnawing for the bone.
“I hope I gave him rabies,” Ginny later told reporters. “I wouldn’t give my money to that punk. He came after me with his left hand. He stuck it out, so I bit it.”
Ginny told police the man said he had a gun in his pocket, but she figured he’d show it if he really had one. The only post-traumatic stress disorder she reported was revulsion and nausea at having to bite Scruffy’s tattooed arm.
Bank Robbing 101: First Rule Of Stick-Ups Is To Bring Your Gun
Smarter crooks have long known that the keyword in “armed robbery” is “armed.” Two hapless wanna-be stickup men recently learned that lesson anew.
One unidentified suspect, said to be in his early 20s, wearing a dark jacket and baseball cap, slunk into a Safeway store in Sparks, Nev., and accosted a slot machine change woman. (Where else but Nevada would you find a bank of slot machines and a cheerful changemaker in a grocery store?)
Arresting her attention with his semi-steely gaze, the suspect tersely suggested she, “Put some bills and quarters in the trash can that’s behind you, and I’ll take out the garbage.”
She politely explained she couldn’t do that. He suggested more forcefully. She courteously declined. He demanded. She refused. Finally, exasperated, the suspect asked, “If I had a gun, would do that?”
She told him the answer was still no. Police stated he then turned rather dejectedly and left.
The second incident occurred in Edmonton, Alberta, where 30-year-old Kevin Krishna Niranjan threw open the doors of the Bank of Nova Scotia and loudly announced, “Freeze! This is a holdup!”
The crowd of cooperative Canadian customers dutifully froze, waiting for further instructions on their roles as bank robbery victims. And waited. And waited. And waited.
Niranjan, possibly realizing he had forgotten to bring a gun to his holdup, stood mute, seemingly tongue-tied as to his next step. Finally, apparently feeling extremely self-conscious about all those people staring at him, Niranjan yelled that he didn’t think staring at someone was very funny and then fled.
Kevin was apprehended a short time later, but with no gun and no actual theft, police could only charge him with “mischief.”
Gentle Reminders
Sorta like the 90 percent of lawyers who give the other 10 percent a bad name, 10 percent of firearms owners give the rest of us an occasional case of the embarrassed willies.
Fortunately, we can learn from their mistakes — even the stupid ones. And even more fortunately, there were no fatalities involved in these cases reported by the Arizona Fish & Game Department.
In the first case, two hunters were bouncing along in the bed of a pickup truck, clutching their guns, when the driver hit a rut, launching his passengers into the air. When they came down, a firearm went off, wounding one of the passengers.
In another case, an unidentified female hunter wounded herself when she tried to strip off her camouflage clothing without letting go of her rifle.
In the third case, one hunter was snoozing under a tree when his huntin’ buddy decided to wake him up by firing a shot over his head. You guessed it. He missed the sky, the tree, and any itinerant game in the area but shot his sleeping pal.
And finally, our favorite caper begins with a rabbit running into a horizontal length of pipe. In a maneuver reminiscent of the Keystone Cops, one hunter peers intently into one end of the pipe — keepin’ an eye on ol’ Br’er Rabbit, we guess while the other sticks the muzzle of his scattergun into the opposite end and lets ’er rip.
It is quite possible the only thing preventing tragedy in this case was the rabbit’s ability to absorb most of the lead shot while being launched from the pipe like a cannonball.
And just imagine the post-mortem embarrassment if he’d died. The notation on the death certificate would have been: “Death due to high-velocity rabbit impact.”
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Mark Moritz hung up his satirical spurs last issue to a collective sigh of relief from America’s gunwriters whom he had lampooned in “Friendly Fire” for two long, painful years. The 10 Ring is written by Commander Gilmore, a retired San Diego police officer who bases his humor, like Mark did, on actual occurrences. All the incidents described by the Commander are true.
