Steele County sells Thompson $37,500

[westhope]

They found an old Thompson sub-machine gun in the basement and are selling it.

http://www.southernminn.com/owatonna_pe ... f1a3f.html

[BigBlue]

A little dismayed at the sheriff's statement that "they are keeping it off the street". Like selling it to a 'normal' person is a bad thing and so is private ownership of guns. Hate 'them vs. us' thinking...

BB

[xd ED]

At least they didn't melt it, so they got that goin' for them, which is nice.


John Ricker put three spot welds onto his final gun that finished his Gun Coffin Friday night March 7, 2008.
Ricker has melted guns into sculpture for about twenty years.
Now, the artist who works out a BayView-Hunter's Point studio in San Francisco.
Photo By Lance Iversen / San Francisco Chronicle.

After Heath Maddox's father died unexpectedly in 2006, Maddox was clearing out his dad's belongings when he found a surprise: a U.S. military-issued .45-caliber handgun wrapped in a towel and tucked into a kitchen drawer.

Maddox vaguely recalled a story about his grandfather owning the gun, but he wasn't sure why, or how, it turned up in his father's kitchen.

Yet on a recent Friday evening, two years after the discovery, Maddox stood inside artist John Ricker's San Francisco studio, ready to smash the gun flat with a sledgehammer.

"My uncle wanted to keep it in the family," said Maddox, a planner in the city's transportation agency, before he delivered the first blow. "But I knew about John and what he does with guns. ... I wanted it destroyed."

[Ghost]

I would have shot it first.

And on another note I'd think that if somebody was paying nearly 40,000 that they'd come pick it up rather than the county hand deliver it.

[xd ED]

I would have shot it first.

And on another note I'd think that if somebody was paying nearly 40,000 that they'd come pick it up rather than the county hand deliver it.

I'm pretty sure the new owner couldn't cross a state line with it any time soon. Plus it might not be legal everywhere between here and there.


I bet the guy who hid it in the basement thinking he would walk it out the back door is bummed.

[MNGunner]

"And it will be off the streets."

So one of these:
1) The cops were occasionally sneaking it into the streets, maybe on a Friday night? And thus after the sale it will be "off the streets".
2) The "reporter" inserted her own libby-luly opinion into what was supposed to be a news article.
3) The particular officer(s) interviewed really feel that way about guns. If so, wouldn't they have felt obligated to attempt to demilitarize it first, if that's how they feel?
Good thing they didn't, of course, since it's the property of the tax payers and also the gun was not ruined. Although, for museum use it doesn't matter.
How can they declare that it couldn't end up back "in the streets" out of the collection of a "private museum"?
Implying that a legal sale of a gun, (and particularly one that expensive) would somehow put it "in the streets" is a completely irresponsible attempt to manipulate the mentally weak who are undecided and reinforce the opinions of the mentally weak who have already drank the blue cool-aid.

[jshuberg]

Anytime anyone uses the term "the streets" in any capacity, it's basically a codeword for me that the person using it is an imbecile.

Is my machine gun considered to be "in the streets" because I own it, rather than an agency?

[jshuberg]

Also, what's the deal with the fact that the Sheriff's office "found" it in the basement? They didn't know they owned this machine gun? That is absolutely and completely reckless. How is it that a registered machine gun gets lost and forgotten? I wonder what else they have lying around that no one knows about, or what else has already walked out the door without their knowledge?

If we were to hold our government to the same standards they hold us to, most of them would be in prison.