ESTESBOG

EPISODE 2

In Colorado, as in most states, for safety’s sake it is illegal to possess a loaded gun (cartridge in the chamber) in a vehicle. It is also illegal to fire a weapon from a vehicle, whether on or off road and it is illegal to fire from or across a public road. Yet so many Colorado hunters, despite having to take mandatory hunter safety classes before they can buy a hunting license, somehow rationalize that the seconds that it will save them if a deer or a pheasant runs across the road in front of them justifies breaking those rules.

The ones I can’t figure out are the knot-heads that store their weapons in the bed of the pickup or the back of their SUV fully loaded. There is no advantage and often it places themselves or their passengers in great danger. I once wrote a ticket up in Sedgwick County to a goose hunter who was driving alone off road in a Suburban with a collection of long guns stacked inside the rear cargo door with barrels aiming right at his seat. The top one in the stack was an enormous 10 gauge shotgun fully loaded with giant shells that looked like small sticks of dynamite! What on earth was he thinking? The fine wasn’t very large. Unfortunately you can’t write someone a ticket for being stupid.

Another time through binoculars I watched a man get out of his SUV and open the tailgate to remove a pump shotgun laid in the back with the barrel pointed at the driver’s seat. He popped open the breach, apparently to make sure it was loaded, then drove it back shut. Instantly the defective gun went off aimed at the ground and blew a large chunk of asphalt skyward startling both the hunter and the two game wardens watching him in the distance. As if to prove the deliberateness of his stupidity, he reloaded the defective firearm and placed it back in his vehicle exactly as it had been before! The guy turned out to be an engineer from the Denver metro area – a person that certainly should have been smart enough to know better. I wrote that ticket with no regrets.

More than twenty years ago Game Warden Larry Budde, now retired from the agency, was on patrol in rural northeastern Colorado north of Hillrose. There is a long bridge across the South Platte on a back road. As he approached the bridge from the south side, Larry spotted the top of a vehicle about to come up onto the bridge from the north. The warden stopped to look and a brand new white pickup with three teenage boys came up onto the bridge and stopped very suddenly when they saw the game warden vehicle 100 yards away on the far side.

Suddenly the windshield of the pickup became opaque white! Budde couldn’t imagine what had happened. He drove forward and, as he approached the truck, he saw a one-inch hole in the center of the roof over the cab and sharp points of steel peeled back around the edges of the hole.

The warden pulled up close to the pickup and could barely make out the driver in a dense cloud of white smoke. He signaled to the young driver to roll his window down. Smoke billowed out of the cab as a stunned face came into clearer view. Budde could see an upright shotgun being held by the boy in the middle.

“Did that shotgun just go off?” Budde asked.

“The kid sort of read his lips, then yelled., “WHA-A-A-T?”