Traveling Gentleman has Too Much Initiative

There are men who cannot pass quietly through life, and then there is Mr. Kenneth Francis, age thirty-six, who appears to have tried traveling with a full assortment of bad decisions so as not to be caught unprepared.

It was a Thursday night in Washoe County, one of those evenings when a man ought to be home minding his business, or at least minding one crime at a time. Instead, a deputy conducted a traffic stop and discovered Mr. Francis was operating a vehicle with all the legal standing of a rumor, no license worth mentioning, no insurance worth trusting, and no registration worth arguing over.

In short, the car was as free as a government promise.

Now ordinarily, that would be sufficient mischief for one citizen. But Mr. Francis is a man of ambition. Upon inspection, he was found to have an outstanding warrant, brass knuckles for conversation, and to keep matters lively, an explosive device in the car.

It is considered poor etiquette to carry explosives in polite society, and worse still to do so near a public area, where the public is in the habit of being. The bomb squad was summoned, which is the government’s way of admitting something has gone past paperwork and into punctuation.

They rendered the device safe, which is a fine trick and one I wish could be applied to certain policies in Washington. Mr. Francis, however, was not rendered safe; he was conveyed to the Washoe County Detention Facility, where his ambitions may be reconsidered at length.

He now faces a tidy collection of charges: possession of an explosive device, possession of a dangerous weapon, driving on a revoked license, lacking insurance, and operating an unregistered vehicle. It is a list so complete it might qualify for a government grant.

There is a lesson here, though it comes wrapped in absurdity, and that is when a man ignores small laws, he often graduates to larger ones, and soon enough finds himself in the custody of men who carry badges instead of excuses. A society that enforces its laws early saves itself the trouble of calling the bomb squad later.

As for Mr. Francis, he has demonstrated a principle long understood on the frontier, which is that if you insist on courting trouble, do not be surprised when it shows up all at once, armed and itemized.