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I was tempted to post this as in “irresponsible gun owner of the day” story, but while there are definitely some irresponsible elements I really can’t blame the guy. We’ve all been there, frustrated with our computer to the point where we want to throw it out the window. One Colorado Springs man felt that pain late one night, and decided to go all Office Space on its ass. He took it into the basement, grabbed his gun, and put eight rounds into it. And then the police arrived . . .

From Ars Technica:

According to the local police blotter, Colorado Springs police responded to the sound of the gunshots and ticketed Hinch for discharging his gun within city limits, a misdemeanor offense. Police spokeswoman Catherine Buckley told the Los Angeles Times that Hinch had just purchased a new gun, and when the police arrived on the scene, he told the officers he didn’t realize he was breaking the law in discharging his weapon.

Hinch, however, told the Times he has no regrets.

“It was glorious,” he said. “Angels sung on high.

“It was premeditated, oh, definitely,” he added. “I made sure there wasn’t anything behind it and nothing to ricochet.”

Hinch told The Smoking Gun that his 9mm was a Hi-Point pistol he bought off Craigslist. The officers confiscated Hinch’s gun but left the disabled Dell. Hinch is scheduled for a May 11 court hearing where he could be fined. Police told the Los Angeles Times that jail time is unlikely.

What piqued my interest was that the gun in question was a Hi-Point 9mm. There’s little doubt that the Hi-Point handgun has been involved in a disproportionate number of murders and generally idiotic firearms related activities, and its nice to see that trend continue. But what really surprised me was that the gun functioned for eight full rounds! Its a bona fide miracle!

Note for those wanting to follow suit: take the time to bring your box to the firing range. Even a misdemeanor isn’t worth it.

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72 COMMENTS

  1. Way to go dufus. Got mad because of slow JPG downloading, wink wink, while high in the Colorado Rockies?

  3. Heh! Yeah I saw this one the other day. All I can say is as much as I’ve wanted to do this before I, for one, just don’t have enough money to buy a new computer each time I get a BSOD.

    • LOL… yeah, I’d shoot a DELL too. Or beat it senseless with a bat.

      Been building computers since ’97, when my uncle opened my tiny junior high brain to the idea you can make your own. Building your own comp is like building your own gun or car – it’s fun and addictive.

      • This. Comes out much cheaper in the long run too. Unless you have a Steam games habit like I do 🙂

        • Oh thank god! I thought I might have been the only one addicted to steam games and firearms… Glad to see I’ve got company.
          Btw, check out “humble bundle” you can usually score multiple great games for only $6-7 and proceeds go to charities like the E.F.F. makes it completely worth while.

      • Considering the nature of homeopathy, I’d say it was a homeopathic herb store, exactly as stated. I doubt “homeopathic marijuana” would sell.

    • Shooting a Dell is the best thing you can do with it, Put it – and its user – out of its misery.

  6. Don’t worry about posting it as an “irresponsible gun owner of the day story,” Dan Zimmerman did that yesterday.

  7. LMAO! Oh now that is EPIC! Now face it Nick you and I both probably wanted to drag an POS server out to the range on occasion! I can sooo empathize with his plight.
    Well back to patching more servers!

    • Heh, I know exactly what you mean as I’ve been dealing w/ problems of mine own. I’m on my file server right now, because my desktop arbitrarily corrupted it’s bios, for the 5th time (mostly happened when awaking it from S3). Main symptom is that it won’t initialize the pci-e slots until power has been removed & all caps fully discharge. Which, can take weeks. Then it will default back to the factory settings, and it works again for a few months. I’ve learned to hate UEFI in the meantime, since you can’t navigate w/ the KB to blind flash.

      However, as frustrating as a intermittent issue with a BIOS chip is/has been, I don’t think I’ll be taking my custom water cooled system out to blast it. Finding another 4.9 Ghz stable Ivy-E is, shall we say, akin to the odds of winning lotto jackpots. :p

        • Hm. no edit dialog.

          Anyways,

          Verify the power rails with a good DVM (like a Fluke or eqiv.).

          Cheap power supplies can put a lot of noise on the DC. That can make ‘puters flaky. That’s the main reason to replace with a quality PS.

        • Thanks for the advice, much appreciated.

          I’d already done so, and I only use top quality parts. Especially where psu’s are concerned, JohnnyGuru & Oklahoma Wolf are the only people I trust when seeking out the best. It goes with the territory when seeking maximum performance (oc’ing).

          I’m a tech, so yeah load testing the psu was first priority, followed by replacing the BIOS battery and shimming batt terminals to ensure perfect contact, checking integrity of the connections (custom built harness with crimped & soldered connections on everything except ofc the molex 4 pins/SATA’s), Double checked everything, swapping out the EVGA 1300 G2 for a new 1000 P2. Burnished the DIP pins & socket as well as reflowing the socket and recurved the contacts for a tighter pin contact just in case.

          No dice, still corrupting the BIOS every few months.

          Pretty certain that the package is an fpga, & while I have eprom burning capability, w/o knowing the specific pinout, which is likely proprietary… That left me with only one option, dealing with Asus & their legendarily terribad support dept again. They’re supposed to have shipped the replacement chip, but by standard mail. I can’t even fathom using USPS letter service for a chip. Great service, seeing as how I own their most expensive mobo of the last generation, an X79 Rampage IV… :/

    • I recommend an espresso machine if you desire blindingly fast coffee. It’s about all I drink anymore, lol.

      • My daily coffee addiction is satisfied by 2 or 3 cups from the B70, plus a big (2 pods @ 2.8 oz each, plus 6 oz milk) latte from the Rivo.

        Yeah, Keurig / Green Mountain gets me for about $60 a month, but that’s a lot cheaper than any coffee shop (especially when I consider that the closest decent one is 10+ miles away).

        • I have to admit to being spoiled. I have a close friend who owns a shop that roasts daily on site, I pay wholesale cost for my beans. No blends w/ lower quality, grown who knows where arabica like most either, 100% pura. Nom-nom!

  9. Working in IT, I cannot blame him one bit. I even take some hard drives to the woods to perform a “secure wipe” of their contents. I occasionally take coworkers with me when I feel they could use a little ballistic therapy (on the hard drives, not them). The guys in surplus get a chuckle when I bring the drives in for disposal, and my answer to “Why didn’t you use the degausser?” is “You just want to suck the fun out of my job, don’t you…”.

    • Blasting hard drives is fun. I occasionally get a few from people I know that dont want them anymore because they are old or burned out. Make great targets for honing up for deer season or self defense practice.

  10. I’ve done this. However, it was an old computer that I was no longer using, and on a range where type of shooting is allowed. Old computers with spray paint targets on them make great prone long range targets. 🙂

  11. Bought off of Craigslist?? How the hell did that happen? I couldn’t even post an industrial HEAT gun…

    • The folks at craigslist took someone’s word that a Hi-Point isn’t a real gun. I mean, something that sells for $150 new, with lifetime warranty, can’t possibly be a real gun, can it?

    • I actually sold a gun on Craigslist once. My ad was for a leather holster for a Sig. The gun was in the holster in my ad picture and the holster had a 650.00 price tag. Got it sold just before it was pulled.

      • Now that’s a good idea.

        Just put ‘everything in the picture is included’…

        I like that…

  12. The left hand doesn’t seem to know what the right hand is doing–or vice versa. At any rate–normally I just want to do percussive maintenance when my PC acts up. But so far I’ve even refrained from that.

  13. What is that, around a 14″ group? At 10′, not impressed.

    I’m also an IT guy. He should get off with justifiable computercide.

  18. I heard the DOJ is considering leveling hatecrime charges, as its being hailed as the first Luddite murder of an AI machine.

    • Oh crap! I hope the statue of limitations is short on that. I’ve “Hate Crime Murdered” half a dozen laptops over the last few years!

  19. As someone who’s been frustrated more than once with a recalcitrant PC, I can kinda sympathize here.

    As for the Hi-Point, I know guys who’ve put hundreds of rounds through theirs without a hiccup, and I was under the impression that they were cheap and ugly, but reliable.

  20. This is by no means the first person to shoot a computer… I don’t understand why it’s news, or why the cops are involved… I had several dumbass customers shoot their computers back when I had a beige box shop in the 90s.

    Stupid people shouldn’t be allowed to own anything more complex than a toaster.

    • So you say stupid people “should not be allowed” to own anything more complicated than a toaster.

      I thought you hated all things government with a burning passion?

  21. I plugged mine in in the backyard and proceeded to take my trusty softball bat to it.. there is no satisfaction in beating to death or shooting an unplugged computer…I wanted it alive,while absorbing my wrath…

  22. Back in the day, folks including Elvis shot their TV’s. I remember styrofoam bricks being sold to throw at your TV instead of the real thing.
    Sigh!
    Have used an old desktop Dell for range practice before though. It was rather satisfying.
    I thought those “herbalist” kinda folks were peaceful non-violent types. Put the gun down, and go back to the bong ya’ damn hippy!

    Geez!

  23. “Note for those wanting to follow suit: take the time to bring your box to the firing range”

    Or to your back yard, outside of city limits.

    Roughly 30 miles from this story’s misdemeanant, I’ve shot lots of stuff in my back yard – including several Dell XPS 710 motherboards and a bunch of hard drives. No laws broken and, even though they’re only 100 yards away, no neighbors pissed off.

    • Are you sure it’s not keyholing? Third from the top looks a little enlongated / distorted, too.

  25. Can’t take our badtronics to the local range, unfortunately. The various trace-but-nasty elements and compounds would make a mess (somewhat, literally, but huge, paperwork-wise) to clean up for the range. Since we’re a not-for-profit all-volunteer club…

    • That’s amusing… Literally hundreds of pounds of lead in the berm, but a few stray molecules of arsenic or PCBs, and it’s a hazardous waste site…

  27. Looks like an old Dell XPS. I had one that looked exactly like that until I caught the rage and yanked it’s innards out and built myself a new one.

  29. I’ve wanted to do this many a time to at least 1 desktop, laptop, and phone each. Alas, I’ve not ever gotten around to it yet. I spend more time rebooting my lousy straight talk phone (samsung galaxy centura) than anything else with it, yet it’s apparently indestructible with regards to slamming it down on a hard surface. Hell, the screen isn’t even cracked or chipped anywhere, and it’s never failed to start up, either. It’s never failed to crash, either. Someday, very soon I hope…

    Tom

  30. There was a hated Data General Novell server many moons ago that was thrown into the back of a truck, along with a bunch of ComputerLand Corp salespeople and techs.

    A drive to the country followed.

    For many of the salespeople and techs, it was their first experience with a .308 rifle.

    That, my friends, is team building 🙂

  31. When we were forced to junk all of our Windows XP computers I formatted the hard drives, removed them from the computers before they went to recycling and took all the hard drives to the range where I “kinetically destroyed” them with my AR. That was fun!

  34. Once again, TTAG seems to be the only outlet with a poor view of the hipoint even though you can google the words ‘hipoint torture’ and return fantastic stories on reliability. Okay, your pistol was bad. At least realize you’re the exception to the rule?

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