This Is Becoming Habit, Boys.
I need to talk to y’all about Montgomery County. It’s just northeast of here and it has more bowling alleys and trailer parks per square mile than is allowed by most states. It’s where men are men and sheep are scared.
Well, the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department decided that they needed a fancy 4X4 heavily armored very expensive vehicle/tank. Nobody seemed to know why they needed it except that they have five ole boys on commissioner’s court all named Bubba.
About two years ago, they decided that they also needed a $300,000 drone that could be fitted with a single or multiple-shot 40mm grenade launcher, 25mm grenade launcher or 12 gauge shotgun. Again, the Bubba thing.
The very first day they went out and tested their $300,000 drone was one of those “Hey Festus, hold my beer and watch this” moments. Amid much fanfare and teevee cameras, the drone – in mid test – amazingly and gloriously crashed. But, not just your normal crash. No, sireee. That sucker up and crashed right into the armored 4X4. I mean, that drone had all of Montgomery County to crash into and it picked their other favorite expensive toy.
Which brings us to yesterday.
Divers scoured the bottom of Lake Conroe in the hope of recovering a controversial $250,000 police drone that crashed into the water Friday.
The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the remote-controlled helicopter drone, which was bought in 2011 with a federal grant, suffered a malfunction and went down during an exercise over the lake.
The drone weighs 50 pounds. If it crashed on you, it would hurt like the dickens. Then there’s the problematic situation of all the firepower accidentally going off.
Now the way I figure it, this drone has given them two warnings and you would think that would be enough, but noooo… they are sending drivers into the lake to find it. I hope that sucker has already dug its way to China.
Well, at least this drone was $50,000 cheaper, or so they say. Yeah, that’s all we need – a discount drone.
Thanks to Daniel for the heads up.
Until there’s a “Mission Telemetry for Dummies,” the Bubba 5 might want to switch to Nerf N-strike. Best they wear safety glasses, too or someone might lose an eye to one of these goobers.
1Are these boys still upset that they didn’t have a train set when they were kids? Can’t they just go out and buy a red sports car each or some Viagra or something? (Apologies to their wives if they’d prefer they didn’t on the Viagra.) Whatever, have them do it with their own dern money.
2I would speculate that Montgomery county leads the state in Viagra sales.
3I saw this late last night when I was on my Kindle. Couldn’t figure out how to send it to you. Glad you got it anyway. I laughed enough to wake myself up and it took another hour to get to sleep. It did bother me a bit too because my daughter lives in Conroe. I guess it’s a good thing she drives a Ford instead of an armored car.
4Dorks. Isn’t total dominance of TV remote controls enough to demonstrate how big theirs is?
@Ralph – C’mon, Ralph. I would bet that these clowns NEED that Viagra. It’s probably the only way these boys can keep “something” in the air!!
5Just like the feeling of safety we get with an open carry, well regulated militia wandering the little league baseball fields of suburban America, we also need an equally well regulated Militia Air Force guarding our skies, or in this case the bottom of our lakes.
These people would be a danger in a 5 mph golf cart. With nerf bumpers.
6Isn’t buying this type of weaponry with county dollars sort of suggestive of the county official up in the South Plains who decided they needed to be ready to fight Obama’s government and the UN?
7Is Montgomery County ( or is it Ft. Bend?) where the guy running for office (maybe commissioner) voted in two states and you published the proof? What ever happened there? Probably nothing. Sigh
8Linda, it was Fort Bend and of course nothing happened. Our district attorney is a wimp when he’s not being a weenie.
9In a way I must apologize about them Bubba boys. It seems that after 911 the government was actually giving away money to help local constabularies buy some toys that were supposed to scare you poopless. That offer still exists but not to the degree it did upon inception. I am not surprised that the Fraternal Order of Bubbas want them some of these toys. Frankly what the guvmint was hoping they would opt for first thing was the command center on wheels. Its the size of the trailer on the 18 wheel Coca Cola delivery truck and it is supposed to have everything that a police department would need at a crime scene. Its too bad the Bubbas a stuck on drones. Those things can turn on you and kill you if you don’t know what the hell you are doing. And that armored vehicle? Its mostly used by SWAT teams. The Bubbas would have to prove they already have one in existence in order to get an armored personnel carrier. Sigh. Just realized that you all should look out for yourselves with the quintuplets around. They sound like they don’t know ying from yang.
10We can add this to the list of suggested topics for a 50s style wild and crazy movie.
11Maybe it was a “smart drone” and looked around with it’s little scanning and communicating devices, ID’d the armored vehicle and said “Hey! That’s the only threat I see in these parts!” and proceeded to, er, let it’s training take over…
12I know it’s a typo, but you wrote about their sending “drivers” into the lake to look for the drone. Maybe those “drivers” could be behind the wheel of the armored 4X4.
13I read about this in the a.m. and wondered if it could possibly be the same YoYos that crrashed the drone into the armoured vehicle. It was hilarious the first time. Is some alien force eating the brains of all white middle aged republicans. You know they are republicans. And yes, Umpty they probably did send drivers to the bottom of the lake on a mission.
14If a man’s private parts are in inverse proportion to the size of the weapons he chooses to sport, these five guys must be microscopic.
15I think what you are looking for JuneBug is Aisles-heimers syndrome and they get it from being plugged into Fox news and talk radio 24/7. Texas may be the epicenter of the epidemic, which seems to be more prevalent in the South and Southwestern US, although the upper Midwest seems to have a local variant of the infection.
16Thank you, thank you, thank you. I was having a bad day, and then I read this column on my iPad.
I laughed so hard I fell off the toliet!
17(Rotflmao)
What those doofuses need now is a remote controlled submarine.
18The only thing that can stop a good guy with an APC is another good guy with a drone.
19Lo and behold, the local SWAT team was inside the tank when the drone crashed into it. Nobody hurt physically, but may be suffering from PTSD from the embarrassment.
20Sounds like an installment of SNL’s “High-Fivin’ White Guys.”
Wasn’t there a situation recently where the FAA basically said “Now wait a minute” about all these law-enforcement-owned drones and some Houston area cop shop got all twisted up because they said “We NEEEED them! For SEEEEAAARCHES! Really! Really!”
21Parker County has the Mobile Command Center, and I have to say it is way cooler than anything the Nerf, Lego and Hot Wheels people could come up with even working together.
22If anyone here is curious about how such armament gets to local law enforcement, I can suggest a truly great book. It’s called “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces” and the author is Radley Balko. If you recognize his name, you may know his work from HuffPo (he also writes for Reason, the libertarian mag). It was one of the finest books I read in 2013. It’s now out in paperback. Radley Balko writes really well, and the book is both infuriating and enlightening.
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