Scrumptious Word Morsels

The scene is yesterday at about 6:30 p.m. The sun is setting and it’s getting dark out, but it’s not quite nighttime yet. I’m coming home from an afternoon of apartment shopping, and I stop at my credit union on the way home because I’ve got some checks to deposit. I’m standing at one of the two ATM’s, waiting for the machine to finish sucking in my deposit envelope so that I can get my receipt and go home. Since it was a fairly warm day yesterday, I decided to carry openly, with my pistol in plain view on my waist. When summer rolls around in Tucson, concealed carry more or less goes out the window.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a white pickup truck with two Mexican guys pull into the parking lot. They look kind of sketchy, but I don’t think about it too much because there are a lot of people in Tucson who look just like them. One of the guys gets out of the truck and starts heading straight towards me, even though there’s a vacant ATM right next to me. I half-turn to get a better look, and now my gun is fully exposed in this guy’s line of sight. He stops, takes one look at my waist, and turns around to head back to the truck at a quicker pace than he originally came. The truck peels out of the parking lot, I grab my receipt, and that’s the end of that.

I don’t really want to think about what could have happened had I not been carrying yesterday, but I might have had a pretty unfavorable situation on my hands. It’s not like the guy pulled a weapon on me and demanded my wallet, but the whole thing was extremely suspicious at the very least. Why come to the bank if you’re not going to use the ATM? Why walk towards me when there’s an open ATM on the other side? Why turn around and change your mind after seeing that I wasn’t going to be an easy mark? Exactly.

Stay safe out there. Your personal safety is nobody’s responsibility but your own.