There’s a very specific kind of stupid that doesn’t even require the guy to do anything actively wrong — he just has to leave something lying around in exactly the wrong way, and the universe handles the rest. Today’s story is a public service announcement from that category.
We were on our way to Dollar General, which is possibly the lowest-stakes errand available to modern man. I’m rolling along in my wheelchair, minding my business, mentally rehearsing my Dollar General shopping list (a task that requires zero brainpower and yet somehow always gets the brainpower anyway). Standard errand. Nothing to see here.
Except there was something to see: a guy sitting on the sidewalk, elbow-deep in his backpack like he’s performing surgery on it, and lying right next to him, just out in the open on the concrete, is a handgun. Looked like a 45.
Now, I want to walk you through the internal monologue, because it moved fast. It went from huh, a guy to wait, is that a gun to is this man seriously just leaving a loaded 45 sitting on a public sidewalk while he rummages through his bag like he’s looking for chapstick in about the time it takes me to roll six feet closer. That’s a big escalation for a Tuesday.
Here’s a detail that matters to this story: I’ve got a concealed carry permit — though full disclosure, it’s currently lapsed, so I wasn’t carrying that day. But the training doesn’t turn off just because the paperwork did. So this wasn’t “random guy clocks a stranger with a gun and feels a vague sense of unease.” This was “guy whose brain is wired to actually run a threat assessment” clocking what looked like a loaded 45 sitting unattended on the ground while somebody rummages through a backpack next to it. To be fair to the situation, and to myself: he wasn’t holding it, wasn’t reaching for it, wasn’t pointing it at anybody. Nothing about his posture said “draw.” So this isn’t a story about how close I came to pulling on a guy — it’s a story about how differently that scene registers once you’ve got that training in your head, even sitting there mostly dormant. A totally unarmed, untrained bystander rolls past and thinks “huh, weird.” I rolled past running an actual mental checklist.
And here’s the part that actually gets me: I rolled right past the thing still fully convinced it was real. It wasn’t until I was already past him that I caught it — the orange tip. That little safety-orange nub on the barrel that exists for the sole purpose of telling everybody “relax, this one doesn’t shoot bullets.” It’s a BB gun.
Not a 45. Not a single functioning bullet involved. And I only clocked that after I’d already rolled by, which means for a solid few seconds there, I was operating on the full, unqualified belief that I’d just passed a stranger casually parked next to a loaded firearm — and thanks to the background I’ve got, every reason to be running through what happens next.
So nobody actually got hurt. Great news. But it doesn’t cancel out how badly this guy handled it, because it doesn’t matter that it was fake — I didn’t know that until I was already past him, and neither would anyone else rolling or walking by from that angle. If you’re going to carry something shaped exactly like a real handgun, in public, and set it down next to you on the sidewalk like it’s a Gatorade bottle, you are rolling the dice on how the next person who sees it is equipped and trained to respond. Some of those people are just startled bystanders. Some of them are carrying and running a very different set of calculations in that half-second — I happen to have that training even though I wasn’t armed myself that day. An orange tip only works as a safety feature if people actually see it before somebody’s nervous system does something about it first.
So really, we’ve got a two-for-one stupid special today: him, for treating a realistic-looking BB gun like a set of keys he could toss on the pavement, orange tip facing the wrong way to do anybody any good — and me, for a few genuinely tense seconds of believing I’d wheeled myself past a guy with an unattended, unexplained handgun sitting a few feet from him. At least mine only cost me some adrenaline. His could’ve cost him a whole lot more if the wrong person — someone actually carrying and quicker to read the situation than I was that day — or the wrong cop, had rolled up on it first.
Dollar General trip continued without further incident. No BB gun casualties reported. Just a solid reminder that stupid comes in flavors, and today’s flavor was “convincingly armed until proven otherwise — and lucky nobody proved it the hard way.”