Category: A Victory!
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An Amish Barn raising
GUNCRANK DIARIES
Love. It’s the glue that binds humanity together. True love is selfless. True love is sacrificial. True love overlooks faults. One chaotic evening in the emergency department, I saw for real the indomitable power of true love.
Our heroine was 29 years old. She arrived by POV (Personally Owned Vehicle) attended by her boyfriend. He was doting and attentive. The fact she was conscious and conversational shocked me. She had been shot in the head.
She was sitting up when we met, a scant dribble of dark blood tracking down the side of her face. Her left eye bulged monstrously. Bullet wounds are almost mystically sinister up close, like the blackness of an evil man’s soul. This one seemed about the diameter of a pencil and was centered on her left temple.
Miracle Of Misfortune?
I don’t know why, but we always asked what happened. It’s not that it really much matters. The type of firearm is germane to a degree, but the psychosocial events leading up to the shooting not so much. However, I just never could resist. I always wanted to hear the story.
It was the boyfriend who provided the details. He said he had come in from whatever it was he did and was unloading his daily gear — a trim little .380ACP pocket pistol part of his daily loadout. He told me he slipped the little gun out of his pocket and set it down sideways on the top of the dresser.
He had no idea how it happened. He strongly suspected the gun was defective and explained he might have a lawyer review the issue. Somehow, when he set the gun down, it went off.
Bullets are the very embodiment of physics. They describe a path based predominantly upon their orientation and initial velocity. Projectiles fall to earth driven by the constant acceleration due to gravity. Like everything else in the universe, they continue in motion until affected by outside forces. The boyfriend explained the evening’s sordid outcome was pure unvarnished random.
His girlfriend had been standing across the room inquiring as to the nature of his day. When the gun went off the little bullet had traversed the bedroom and, as foul luck might have it, struck the hapless women in the temple. After quite a lot of frenetic chaos as well as a trip screaming across town to the ER here we were.
The Truth Hurts
It was indeed a compelling tale. However, this was not my first gunshot wound. When I examined the thing closely, I noticed charred flesh with ample powder stippling fanned out from the point of impact. There was even a little tearing of the skin around the wound.
As anyone who has ever watched one of those criminal forensics TV shows might attest, you can ascertain a great deal from an entrance wound. A bullet fired at a distance just punches a hole. The same thing at contact range will tattoo the surrounding skin with unburned powder and carboniferous ick. This was definitely the latter sort. Compelling story notwithstanding, this guy had clearly put his gun to this young woman’s temple and stroked the trigger.
The lady in question was doing shockingly well, considering. The anemic little bullet had transected her left optic nerve, deflected downward through her maxillary sinuses, and come to rest behind her rearmost right upper molar. I cleaned her up and found a maxillofacial surgeon who popped the spent projectile right out.
I waited until the moment was right and got a pal to remove the boyfriend for a while. Once it was just her and me, I explained my concerns regarding the nature of the wound and how it didn’t seem to jive with the boyfriend’s story. I assured her we could keep her safe, and if he had indeed shot her intentionally, then we would need to deal with that.
Throughout it all she stuck religiously to the tale. The gun went off when he set it down. He loved her, and she loved him. There’s nothing he would ever do to harm her intentionally. I pushed as much as I was comfortable, but then let it drop.
The cops did the same, but when the victim swears it was an accident, there’s just not a lot left with which to work. They had likely rehearsed their stories en route to the hospital. I discharged her the following day, now irrevocably half blind, in the company of her boyfriend. He was as attentive and affectionate as ever.
Taking place in Grafenwoehr, Germany, the competition — which first ran from 2016 to 2018 before being paused due to other competitions and the COVID-19 pandemic — comprises 10 graded events designed to measure a tank crew’s physical fitness, marksmanship and mental acuity. 
“The other crews that were behind and chasing … are really talented crews, and the fact that we’re the first American team to [win] on this stage is incredible,” he added.
English upper-crust wing shooters can be prone to throwing snits and fits, but this one has nothing to do with a servant’s tipping over the toddy or Lord Muddleford wearing incorrect knickers on the moors.Now, the genteel gentry is accusing British pheasants of “unsporting behavior.” That’s pheasants, not peasants, folks.
“They are no longer flying high enough or fast enough to make a decent shot, and the (older) ones are too lazy or fat to take off,” sniffed an editorial in a London paper. “Game birds must be bred to fly up … and play the game.”
Over the past few years, outraged pheasant hunters have complained that birds raised for private shoots have grown sluggish and docile, refusing to break madly from cover and flap at Mach One.
One widely-discussed theory lays the explanation squarely on Darwin: high-flying, fast-moving birds get blown out of the sky, while ground-hugging slowpokes are loftily ignored.
The couch potatoes, however, laugh all the way back to the breeding pens, where they presumably pass on their genetic predisposition to woof a second helping of suet and lumber through the air like a DC-3 with the starboard engine out.
“A perverse Darwinism of the survival of the unfittest seems to be working its natural deselection,” asserts the Times.
“A little poke in the tail feathers with an 870 might help,” asserts American Handgunner, “It’s the American way.”
Return to the Scene of the Crime
Just four simple rules of armed robbery, and this rocket scientist couldn’t learn ’em. Rule number one — Don’t return to the scene of the crime. Number two — If you do, don’t bring a friend. Number three — If you do, don’t approach one of the clerks you stuck up at gunpoint only five days previous and mutter to your compadre, “She’s the one.”
Number four — If you’re stupid enough to violate rules one through three, don’t hang around window-shopping until the cops arrive.
Police in San Diego were at first elated, then mystified, and then just a little let down when they arrested the suspect in an armed robbery of a Toys-R-Us store in the metropolitan area. Five days after the original stickup, the suspect waltzed back into the store with a companion.
Smirking broadly, our criminal mastermind sidled up close to the female clerk he had so recently terrorized, gave his buddy a knowing nod, and said, “She’s the one.” If there was any doubt left in the clerk’s mind, it vanished in an instant.
Young Einstein and friend then proceeded to casually window-shop the area, as the clerk first called the gendarmerie, then stalked the villain on foot. SDPD’s finest arrived in a timely fashion and took no guff, cut no slack, hooked ’em, booked ’em and didn’t look back.
They were pleased to make the arrest and clear the crime, but as one cop asked, “How proud can you be of arresting a cretin like this?”
Hey, pal, it all counts toward 30.
Sometimes Love Hurts — A Bunch
Linda Dillon says she tried to commit suicide with a .22 but the cops are having a tough time buying it. First, she can’t produce the weapon. Second, one shot in the head could be a suicide attempt, okay, but seven pops in the gourd? Something just ain’t right.
Hermosa Beach, Calif., officers went to Dillon’s apartment after a downstairs neighbor reported hearing moans. They found Dillon, a 57-year-old computer consultant, lying incoherent in the hallway of her blood-spattered apartment.
Hospital X-rays showed three slugs still lodged in her head, and other wounds to her neck, cheek, and behind her left ear. A powder-scorched pillow was found at the scene, but no weapon.
As soon as Dillon could talk, she claimed she had tried to commit suicide. Police said she was uncooperative and evasive about such minor matters as when, how, and why she made the alleged attempt, much less how she maneuvered a pillow into position to muffle the shots, then found the determination to fire six or seven rounds into her noggin, then get rid of the gun.
The usual suspects — an ex-husband and a friend — were rounded up, questioned and released. Police were convinced neither was involved in the incident, and agreed they were unlikely to come up with a guilty party as long as Dillon claimed to be her own assailant.
Dillon’s survival was amazing enough, but a doctor’s report made it all the more puzzling.
“The wounds are old,” said police Captain Mike Lavin. “The doctor estimates at least 48 hours or more old. I’m not kidding, it’s unbelievable … We’re talking at least a few days, maybe three or four days.”
Lavin expressed just a tad bit of doubt at Dillon’s suicide story. If she was covering up for someone, he theorized, “It must be someone she really likes.”
Author’s Note: Don’t even think about it. I don’t like anybody that much.
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Mark Moritz hung up his satirical spurs to a collective sigh of relief from America’s gun writers 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.