Years ago, I wrote a column in Portland, Oregon, expressing my surprise at seeing an armed guard at the downtown Burger King.
I just had the image of the rent-a-cop pulling his sidearm and shouting,
“You! With the French fries!! Stop or I’ll shoot!!” Seemed a trifle ludicrous on a number of levels.
Today, I live in Florida, a peninsula-shaped banana republic attached to the southeast U.S.A.
The kind of place where Ted Bundy decided to take his final vacation.
Somehow I managed to be surprised by this news from Palm Harbor:
“A Florida Highway Patrol trooper fired his gun nine times at a man suspected of stealing two bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches from a … gas station.”
That’s 4.5 bullets per sandwich. Just imagine if it had been four steak burritos.
A Highway Patrol spokesman said that “he did not know where any of the bullets landed.”
However, none – zero – of the nine! bullets hit the sandwich bandit, who was finally captured after a high speed chase.
You will doubtlessly be delighted to learn the trooper – who then lied to Internal Affairs investigating the incident – has been punished. Following his ninth reprimand in nine years, he will serve a week’s suspension. Serves him right….
Meanwhile. Same paper, same section, same day. Gainesville. “A sheriff’s deputy had to fire 17 shots to put a deer down hit by a car….the deputy was horrified by what happened and would be referred to a victim advocate. The deputy didn’t know where to shoot, so he called a superior, who said to aim for the heart. Instead, the deputy fired into the abdomen until the deer died.” Seventeen times!!?? The animal is stationary laying in the road, for goodness sake.
Apparently, the deputy was not a hunter.
The Sheriff’s office “now plans to train deputies to quickly kill a distressed animal that can’t be saved.”
But who decides that??