The Man With the Guillotine

A man in California was recently arrested for having a deadly weapon.

A guillotine.

Yes. A full-size guillotine.

There are some news stories that give you information. There are others that immediately fill your head with questions.

My first question was how he transported it.

Before I learned that it was sitting in the bed of his pickup, I had visions of this man pulling a full-size guillotine around behind him in one of those little red wagons we had as children.

Because a guillotine isn't exactly portable.

Nor, for that matter, is it easily concealed.

Nobody is going to be standing in line somewhere thinking, I wonder what that man has hidden under his coat, only to discover that—surprise!—it's a guillotine.

You can't tuck one into your waistband. You can't slip one into a purse. You're not getting one through security by claiming you forgot it was there.

A full-size guillotine announces its presence.

Which brings me to its usefulness as a deadly weapon.

Obviously, guillotines have a rather impressive historical record in that department. Nobody is questioning whether the basic concept works.

But they do seem to require a certain amount of cooperation from the intended victim.

First, you have to get the guillotine into position. Then you need the person you intend to guillotine to come over to it. Then you need that person to put his head into the appropriate opening.

I don't know about you, but somewhere around Step Two I would begin to suspect that perhaps this wasn't an activity I wanted to participate in.

This seems to seriously limit the guillotine's usefulness as a threat to the general public.

I cannot, even with my fairly active imagination, picture a team of one successfully carrying out a mass guillotining. There's simply too much cooperation required from people who presumably have no particular interest in being guillotined. There's too much waiting involved. After the first person, I would think word would get around.

And then there's the really important question:

What was he thinking?

Not just when he was arrested. Earlier. Much earlier.

At some point this man acquired a full-size guillotine.

That's not an impulse purchase at the checkout counter. You don't go out for milk and come home saying, "They were having a sale, and I've always wanted one."

There had to be a moment when the idea first occurred to him.

You know what I need? A guillotine.

Then he had to obtain one.

Then he had to transport it.

Then, on the day in question, he had to put—or leave—the guillotine in the bed of his pickup and drive around with it.

At no point in this chain of events did common sense apparently raise its hand.

And perhaps that's the part I find most fascinating. Not that a guillotine is capable of being a deadly weapon. History settled that question rather decisively. It's that in the twenty-first century, somebody apparently looked at all the possible ways of attracting unwanted attention and settled on driving around with a full-size guillotine in the back of a pickup.

Honestly, I still prefer the little red wagon.

Thanks to my husband for finding this story and correctly deciding that I needed to know about it.