How Not To Worry And Love The Armed Nut

I guess it has now been my turn to be in on the latest craze, Some Stupid Guy Going Nuts And Grabbing A Gun To Solve All His Problems. I had a doctor’s appointment on a Wednesday morning in March 2001, for which I needed to wear shorts. I planned to go back to my apartment around lunchtime and change clothes so I could go to work.

I couldn’t get into the north entrance of my apartment complex, as the driveway I have to take to get home was blocked off by lots of cars, including some police cruisers. I went the long way around to the south entrance, and found my way blocked there too. I tried to reach my apartment on foot, and met up with a police officer who told me in no uncertain terms to stay away, that there was an armed nut on the loose somewhere in the apartments.

This alarmed me. My wife was at work, but it was common for me to raise the blinds on a couple of windows in our apartment so our three cats could curl up in the window sill and catch the sights and sounds of the outside world, which we didn’t really allow them to see otherwise. If someone was looking for targets, or worse yet a hiding place to break into, that might have made an inviting sight for him.

Fortunately, he was confined to a single apartment three buildings down from us. The idiot in question was 51 years old and had lived there about a week. He got into a fight with his ex over the phone, and then proceeded to treat his body to an elaborate cocktail of booze and drugs, the official state power drink of Arkansas. He then called a friend of his and apparently gave some indication that he was thinking about offing himself, so the friend calls the ex, she calls the cops, she and the cops go over there, and he starts firing. I think this is a case where he was hoping for a return volley – in other words, an attempt at suicide-via-police-officer.

Twelve hours after that, the SWAT team finally rushed the place in a magnificently clumsy raid, simultaneously breaking the windows, breaking down the two-inch steel door that all of these apartments had, tear-gassing him, and firing small bean bags from high-powered rifles. (My comment at work the next morning was “Tonight, we have an exclusive interview with the Beanie Baby who ended the siege: Fluffy the pink elephant!”)

I had long since told my wife to go to her parents’ place for the night, and I stuck around the station getting increasingly cranky (and apparently amusing to everyone else) with my commentaries on the situation; I was walking around saying “Hey, if the cops don’t wanna do it, I’ll go cap the guy for ’em. I wanna go home!”

They let us back in at around 1:00am. My wife didn’t return until Thursday evening after her shift at work. If we weren’t already planning on moving at the time, this would almost certainly have been the last straw.

Oh yes, the benefits of alcohol and drugs in our society are myriad. The whole time, I was thinking “Wait a minute! Why is this happening to me? I’m too old to be in a public school! They can’t shoot at me!”