Of Mice and Magnums

By Lee Vander Boegh –

Got a mouse in your house? You better check your exterminator’s resume, just to make sure she never lived in Potter Valley, California. That’s because a woman there recently tried ridding her house of rodents the same way Dirty Harry rids the streets of punks – with a .44-caliber Magnum revolver.

Read about it here.

Some of you may think this is excessive, especially considering the mouse could probably fit into the gun’s barrel. But just remember, there’s no such thing as too many calibers. Hmm… Now that I think about it, that would make a great motto for the NRA; never mind the fact that I have no clue what a caliber is, or for that matter a gun barrel, an NRA or a motto.

But that’s beside the point, and that point is this: Bigger is better. That’s why several Pacific Northwest hunting organizations hunt antelope with Hellfire anti-tank missiles.

Unfortunately for the woman in Potter Valley, her effectiveness didn’t match her excessiveness. Instead of shooting the mice, she accidentally shot herself and another person. That’s because she accidentally dropped the Magnum (which is French for “Bullet the size of a Volvo”) revolver (“revolver”), which fired and shot through the woman’s kneecap, bounced off the keys sitting on the belt loop of a 42-year-old man, grazing the man’s groin before ending up in his coin pocket.

The authorities haven’t released any names, probably because the woman is in custody and the man can’t stop saying “Whew.”

 

Thanks to alert reader MaLinda Gunderson of Nampa, Idaho, who sent in the original news story.