Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Sat, 11 Oct 2008
Well that's not encouraging...
I was riding home from the Lovecraft paper tech tonight, and came across a little surprise:
I noticed something silver and odd-looking on the ground, and looped back around, having thought it was a discarded bullet -- close! It was a munged up .40 caliber handgun casing!
I picked it up, pondering the ominous implications of this find. This was in upper Fremont, a couple blocks south of the Woodland Park Zoo, on Fremont Ave.
I got back on the bike and rode on, but I didn't get more than a couple dozen yards before I spotted another suspicious silvery glint on the pavement. Sure enough, another Speer .40 S&W casing, less munged than the first.
I found them both on the east side of the street, roughly along the line where a parked car's outer set of wheels would run. The fact that I found them both close together and on the same side of the street suggests that they didn't end up there because they were kicked around by cars. Although they'd clearly been run over numerous times, it's unlikely they'd have stayed that close together if they'd been moved very far.
If that's true, then they were likely fired from a semi-automatic pistol out of the passenger window of a northbound car. There could easily have been more I didn't see -- I was trying to get home, not play detective. This was just mid-way along the row of nice brick brownstone-style houses around 48th, and if my scenario holds true, the bullets would have been east-bound, toward the brownstones.
I considered calling the police, but what are they going to do? They'll say thanks for the info, and that'll be the end of it. It might go into a statistic, but probably not -- these could also have fallen out of someone's range bag as they unloaded after a target session.
In any case, I found myself reconsidering my long-held decision that I wouldn't ever carry a pistol. If I'm going to be riding through live-fire areas, that changes things. I certainly haven't changed my mind yet, but I find myself pondering the question again.
Posted at 00:40 permanent link category: /misc
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater