This is Elizabethtown, Ohio. The town doesn't have a store or gas station. It has a bar, a scrapyard, a gravel pit, and what Ohio people call a drive-thru Pony Keg. It also has six working military tanks. This resident owns a tank. He keeps it in front of his house, and I know it moves because it's gone at times. I wish I had my own tank. People don't screw with you much when you have a working tank parked in front of your house. I believe it's an Iranian tank, captured during the war with Saddam back in the eighties. Such advanced technology will enable Iranians to compete with our technology in the next three or four hundred years, after they develop a slingshot with a long enough rubber band to launch their nuclear weapons.
I did some checking and found out there are 994 working tanks owned by private citizens in the United States. There were so many that the Bush and now Obama Administrations had once considered shipping all of them to Iraq and making their owners private contractors. You need an FFL Collectors License to own a tank if it can shoot rounds. Last year, police reports indicated that 41 of these tanks have been fired in anger, killing three people. Six people have been killed from exploding tank barrels, five have been run over by their own tanks, five more drowned when their tanks slipped into lakes and rivers while fishing by tank fire, and four died when turret covers fell on their heads. This means that it is much more dangerous owning a tank than it is to have one fired at you. Still, is it impressive to have a tank parked in your front yard, even if it doesn't work. Add a few junkyard dogs and you have created a real fortress.
(This structure was destroyed due to friendly tank fire from inside building.)
The main thing to remember when checking into owning your own tank is to never fire it indoors and make sure you have the proper ammunition and FFL. The most important thing is to never believe a story created by a fiction writer.
Try a real killer.
Dude, I would so risk bodily harm to have a working tank, tearing around in the backyard. BB guns are illegal in our paranoid little burb, however, I have now learned, since my neighbor called the cops on my kid (rather than talk to me). Let's see what they say about 20 tons of steel.
ReplyDeleteMy tank engine blew up today and it knocked over my garage. Right when I was going to drive down to pick up pizza because my car blew up yesterday.
ReplyDeleteSince I wrote this I did get a tank, but I sold it after it crushed the bottom of my driveway and rolled into the creek. It was fun while I had it.
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