On my blog, lying for a living, I sometimes write about weird crime. Call it research. Call it exploring the boundaries of fact and fiction, in a snarky, voyeuristic way. As a crime writer, I’m fascinated by bizarre and stupid criminality.

I’ve written about – okay, pointed my finger and laughed at – the man who tried to change a tire on his Lincoln Continental by shooting it with a twelve-gauge shotgun. And about the thong bandits, who disguised themselves by wearing scanty lingerie on their faces when they robbed a convenience store. And about Bernann McKinney, the woman who cloned her dead dog, Booger – and was then exposed as the Mormon sex slave kidnapper, wanted in England for abduction and in Tennessee for conspiring to commit burglary so she could buy her favorite horse a false leg. Truly, Bernann is a gift to every author who wonders, Should I write this wild scene, or is it over the top? Why no, it’s not. Write away.

It’s a crazy, well armed, often drunk world of crime out there.

But today, unusually, I posted about this bit of over-the-top crimefighting:

“Sheriff Lott’s New Toy.”

The Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff’s Department (that’s them above) just obtained an armored personnel carrier, complete with a belt-fed, .50-cal turreted machine gun. Sheriff Leon Lott has charmingly named the vehicle “The Peacemaker,” and insists that using a caliber of ammunition that even the U.S. military is reluctant to use against human targets (it’s generally reserved for use against armored vehicles) will “save lives.”

Either these guys have no concept of “overkill,” or the recent Bigfoot sightings in nearby Georgia were not a hoax after all.

(Via Boing Boing.)