Public flashers are an odd bunch. They seem to get their kicks by running around and showing off their concealed, um, goods to complete strangers, so to speak. Flashers may want to be careful about who they flash, though…
A 35-year-old woman was visiting Lake Sacajawea in Washington state with her 6-year-old son when she had a close encounter with a flasher on Thursday around 8 p.m. She later told police that a man in his early 20s allegedly sat down near her and began performing a sex act, according to reports. He told the mother, “Miss, miss. Could you watch this? You need to watch this.”
Well, she wasn’t particularly interested in watching, but if the flasher wanted to do some show-and-tell then she wasn’t about to disappoint. “I put the magazine in my [Ruger .380]. I cocked it,” the woman said. “I said, ‘You need to leave or I’ll shoot you. I’m going to blow your brains out.’”
The man shouted, “Oh, [expletive]!” and fled.
But this no-nonsense mother wasn’t about to let him off that easily. She then sent her Norwegian Buhund Hound (the breed is a bit smaller than German Shepherds) after the man. The pooch cornered the man for a time, but when the woman called back her dog the man escaped.
The funny thing is that this was the first time that the woman ever brought her Ruger with her to the lake. “I just had a feeling,” she said. Sounds like woman’s intuition.
This is an interesting case because the gun owner drew her weapon on somebody performing a relatively minor crime. We don’t mean to belittle what the woman went through by any means, but when you compare it to the types of crimes that would normally force somebody to draw a weapon, like life-and-death home invasions or armed robberies, flashing is not an incredibly dangerous crime (though we’ve heard, for the disturbed individuals who do them, that it could lead further and possibly more dangers acts).
In fact, many gun owners get berated by the rest of the gun community when they overreact and draw a gun in response to a misdemeanors or other minor crimes. For example, a few weeks ago a man fired warning shots in order to scare off some party crashers, and many Guns.com readers who commented weren’t terribly fond of his decision-making skills.
Does drawing a gun on a flasher fall into the same category of excessive force, similar to drawing a gun on a guy who stole your parking space or who is spray painting a building? Does drawing your gun go too far because flashing isn’t an particularly dangerous crime?
Or are sexual acts by their very nature an exception to the rule? Do sex crimes, even comparatively minor ones like flashing, warrant drawing a gun? What do our readers think? Where do you draw the line between crimes that do and do not warrant drawing your gun?