Ah Ha! Using An Unregistered Fishbowl!

Shooting Industry, July, 2001 by Commander Gilmore

Our tale begins with two dummies trying to rob a bar in downtown Winnipeg. The two suspects were kinda floundering in their robbery job when one of them pushed the 74-year-old bartender just a mite too far. That did it! The old gent commenced kicking one of these young punks' butt. When Number Two saw his pal getting the worst of it from a senior citizen, he whipped out a blade and made his move.

His move was brief, however. One of the patrons grabbed a glass fishbowl full of snacks and busted it over Number Two's head. You can just hear the serenade of chirping birdies.

The sound of the fishbowl ringing off Number Two's head must have resembled a call for Round Two. All the patrons suddenly joined in for a rather festive, if not short, session of butt kicking and gourd-thumping.

Winnipeg police said the two guys in their 20s finally escaped the bar with several injuries -- and no loot. Of course, you know what's next, don't you? We're sure they'll be filing lawsuits against their attackers soon.

Brotherhood Gets A Shot In The Arm

It's so nice to see brothers doing things together: football, baseball, robbery. Things just seemed to be going so well until siblings Stacy and Kendrick Mills set up a roadblock on a street in Spartanburg, S.C. Their plan, however, quickly rocketed down the toilet.

They managed to wave down and stop a pickup truck being driven by young Jason Easler. Stacy jumped in the passenger side, while Kendrick stood outside the driver's door waving a pistol and demanding the Big Bucks. Jason coughed up his wallet and tried to hand it to Kendrick, but that wasn't the plan. You have to have a plan, don't you know?

According to the script, Jason was supposed to give his wallet to Stacy. Kendrick batted the wallet away with his gun hand, which sorta caused him to squeeze the trigger. Kendrick's shot missed Jason, whizzed over to the passenger side, and nailed brother Stacy in the arm. Shocked, ticked off, and grabbing his bleeding bicep, Stacy bounced outta the truck and began wriggling around on the ground. Meanwhile Kendrick just stood there looking at his smoking pistol, wondering what went wrong.

Scared spitless but knowing an opportunity when he saw one, Jason dropped his Chevy into first and hauled on outta there. After the police arrived, Stacy and Kendrick tried to weave a tale about how they were attacked and shot by a mean, unidentified truck driver. For some reason, they didn't come across as very believable. Perhaps they'll get a cell together so that they can work out this little family problem.

World's Biggest Saturday Night Special

Boy, those Swedes will go to any length to get illegal guns off their streets. Also, off the water, off barges, those kinds of things. Their latest success involved the seizure of a really big gun and the arrest of a guy who had no idea he was a terrorist.

Government officials rented an ice-breaking ship with a big crane to get to the scene of the crime -- a small, iced-in island near Stockholm -- where they confiscated a 12-foot-long, 4,000-pound, 16th-century bronze cannon. The 50-year-old barge owner now faces a possible four-year prison term. He says he was only using it for ballast, and honest, he wouldn't know how to shoot it if he wanted to. He didn't have a concealed-carry permit, either.

It Could Have Gone Full-Auto

In a bold and courageous move to protect the community from potentially deadly poultry-pointery and wrong-thinking, which is clearly against, uh... maybe some law, somewhere, a school district in Arkansas has suspended an 8-year-old boy under their "zero-tolerance weapons policy." The offense consisted of pointing a weapon described as "a breaded chicken finger" and uttering the words, "pow, pow, pow."

This heinous act is alleged to have occurred in a cafeteria, where numerous other third-graders may also have been armed with breaded chicken fingers, but apparently they ate the evidence. Spokespersons for the school district did not elaborate as to whether the breaded chicken finger was a deadly weapon itself, or if it only became a weapon when accompanied by vocalization, or perhaps, impure thoughts. The breaded chicken finger is said to have been boneless.

Eight-year-old Christopher Kissinger's mother offered the opinion that, "It's just a piece of chicken." Obviously, she has no idea of the deadly nature of battered poultry parts. And me? I didn't even know chickens had fingers.

They Didn't Even Get A Testing Fee

More proof that stupidity knows no borders, we have two Canadian dipsticks who decided to perform their own test on a bulletproof vest. If you can squeeze the word "smart" in this saga, put it right where they decided to start with a .22 rifle. While Idiot #1 wore the vest, Idiot #2 capped a round into Idiot #1's chest. Both were giggling over the lack of death and destruction and decided to graduate straight up to a 12 gauge shotgun.

Being at least semi-smart in a miniscule sorta way, the prime idiot stuffed a phone book under the vest for a little insurance, signaled his buddy to fire a volley and gritted his teeth. He woke up still gritting, sniffing the smoke from his smoldering, tattered ex-bulletproof vest and sucking up the pain from more cracked ribs than a Southern steakhouse and a deep-purple bruise the size of a basketball. Los Dos Stupidos, an ambulance crew, a doctor and a bunch of Mounties learned that even if a ballistic vest stops each and every pellet of a scattergun fusillade, there is this phenomenon of physics called "energy transfer."