Life in New Mexico: What Goes Up Can Treat Your House Like The Death Star When it Comes Down

Police crime scene investigation
(AP Photo/The Daily Times, Rebecca Craig)

Sometimes living in New Mexico isn’t for the faint of heart. Sure, 20 years ago the retirement magazines said it was the promised land of low taxes and a low cost of living. Low crime was even common in much of the state. Unlike blue states and red states, purple New Mexico took a balanced approach to things, making it an easy place for just about anyone to live, assuming you could find a job or didn’t need one.

Those days, however, are gone.

The Land of Enchantment has turned blue. Some outcomes weren’t bad. Gay rights? No big deal for most people. Paying for college with lottery money? That’s all cool. But, then they started messing with the police and the courts, and crime gets pretty dicey now.

Car thefts are way up, as are insurance rates. Albuquerque has gone back to being a war zone, but this time it’s taking other cities along for the ride. Some high profile convictions of police officers and some court decisions led to eased-up policing and a revolving door for all but the most serious of crimes.

Gangs basically have the run of any neighborhood they want and the only way to be safe is to put up cameras, fences, and make sure they know you’re armed and will probably kill them if they attempt to victimize you. It’s possible to peacefully coexist with such people as long as you don’t present as an easy target, you’re not a member of a rival gang, and you aren’t trying to put them in jail. It’s kind of like Somalia before the Islamic courts arrived.

But, even if you try to stay out of it, sometimes it can still affect you. Recently a rival gang decided it needed to intimidate the gang that roams my neighborhood. To accomplish that goal, they drove around for a couple of minutes randomly spraying pistol fire into the air. Then they drove away before the police, the rival gang, or angry non-gang residents could stop them.

Aside from turning over video footage to police, helping them find the brass (something they really should be better at), and letting them know who the witnesses are, it’s not a giant problem. At least it wasn’t until I went on my roof to see whether any rounds came down.

What goes up must come down, and this time it struck the spark arrestor on my water heater’s exhaust. It didn’t pierce the top, so I don’t have to worry about rain, but it knocked it loose from its mount, tore one of the bars out, and punched a nice-sized hole in the lower part of it.

That left me with the question of where the bullet went. Down in the water heater cabinet, I didn’t find a thing. Because the inner pipe had been knocked loose, I was able to lift the whole assembly out and looked for clues.

Anyone who has shot steel targets will see the spalling. The bullet had just enough energy to mess up the aluminum spark arrestor and then disintegrate, sending bits of lead and copper down the exhaust tube. This explained why I didn’t find a bullet in the water heater closet.

The Star Wars comparison in this situation wasn’t lost on me.

While they didn’t manage to hit the reactor system water heater, they did hit my home’s thermal exhaust port and sent bits of the bullet down into the water heater closet. I doubt any of these clowns could hit broad side of barn (or womp rat) if they were really trying, but they managed to inadvertently pull off some rather impressive indirect fire.

May the force be with you.

 

 

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13 thoughts on “Life in New Mexico: What Goes Up Can Treat Your House Like The Death Star When it Comes Down”

  1. Judging from the pic It really wasn’t ‘went up and came down.

    From the pic it looks like it came in at an angle indicating it was ‘aimed’ in that direction from ground level.

    1. Nah, from the perspective of an old roof repair guy, it looks like an up and down shot. The apparent lay of the shingles suggests it was struck on the upslope side (if it actually sits as the second pic shows). Vent stacks are almost always located in a relatively hidden section of roof, e.g., the back. If the ridge line is parallel to the street, and this vent cap is in the back of the roof, it will be hidden from street view by the ridge. No direct line of sight. Also, look at the angle of the hits. First it hit the top edge of the cap, and then went down and penetrated the bottom, maybe ~25° from vertical. If it had sufficient velocity to penetrate the bottom after denting the top and pushing aside the metal strip from above, then it would have had sufficient velocity to penetrate the edge of the cap from below, without being deflected 90° downward.

      Now, against my speculations. Where’s the bullet? If it was up and down, it’s energy would have largely been spent in the air, with not much more than slingshot velocity when it hit the cap. Is that enough velocity to make it splatter, as the third pic suggests, even if it was plain lead?

      The great tragedy of science, is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. Or something like that.

      1. I mean the one shot in the vent thingie…see the black mark leading into the hole and the angled nature of the hole. That black mark is the bullet impacting at an angle then skidding into the thing making the hole and causing the slight angled edge of the hole.

        Its the same pattern that appears in upper surface of aircraft wings when they get shot at from behind as the aircraft passes over. It comes in at an angle from ground level from behind, produces the skid mark and then the slightly angled hole. The angle of the hole indicates the direction the round came from.

        The round usually breaks into pieces when this happens which explains why she did not find the whole bullet but only pieces down the vent inside.

  2. My sister lives in Santa Fe. She is a fine artist who makes and sells jewelry. She told me that she lost most of her friends when it came out that she is a Trump supporter. Literally, invitations to parties, gatherings, holiday festivities all stopped. She and her husband are feeling isolated and, so, are planning their move back eastward, probably to one of the Carolinas.

    For the left, ‘inclusiveness’ means excluding those who think differently. ‘Equality’ means looking down on people with whom you disagree. ‘Diversity, means ‘we all must be alike’.

    Too bad my sister and her husband are afraid to become gun owners. That would really frightened the neighbors.

    1. I’ve been to NM only twice in my entire life. Driving straight thru the stste nonstop on the I-40 from CA to TX, then nonstop again the following week on the return leg of the trip. Northeastern NM was one of the bleakest and most depressing areas (shanty towns along the highway) I’ve seen in my life.

  3. Lotteries are a scam to make money. Why didn’t the cost of college drop after all of the powermega lotteries were implemented? I know of at least one case where state legislators redirected previous college funding since the lottery was handling it. (In other words, no *extra* money for college.) Money is power. Controlling more state funds means more power. Also, is New Mexico the only state with lotteries?

    Serious question. I keep asking, but no one will answer me. What is a gae* right? If it only applies to gae people, then how is that not a privilege? Also, is New Mexico the only state with these “gae” rights? I live in a red district (pretty much forever, historically) within a now reliably red state. I’ve known gae people here for decades that get along just as well as any hetero person. I’m not trying to give you a hard time. I’m only interested in the truth.

    You admitted that NM was a nicer place when it wasn’t a full on blue state. It seems like you’re trying to convince yourself that Democrat control was worth it. It doesn’t look like it was worth it.

    *avoiding moderation

  4. No one of consequence

    Time to move to Rio Rancho, Jennifer. Or maybe one of the smaller communities in northern NM with lower crime rates than Albuquerque.

  5. Let’s be honest. Perhaps the greatest hallmark of people who traditionally identify with or vote with the Democrat Party is that those people operate almost entirely on emotion with very few limits. (Proof: the Democrat Party is the party that promotes the “transgender” fad–a notion that men can be women and vice versa which is absurd on its face.)

    A society (New Mexico in this particular case) which operates almost entirely on emotion with very limits will obviously end up in the proverbial weeds and bad things, which were/are avoidable, will happen.

    1. Men can ‘act’ like women and women can ‘act’ like men; but, men cannot ‘become’ women and women cannot ‘become’ men.
      Just get them to drop their britches and the evidence is revealed.
      Relative to ‘gay’ rights, they already have the same rights as every other citizen.
      If they don’t know which restroom to use, then they should go behind a tree.

  6. Ehhhhhh…… bullets falling from gravity aren’t going very fast in ballistic terms.

    Because…..physics.

    I tend to think this hit was on the way out, not the way down.

    Sounds like the neighborhood needs to have a community dove hunt……or something similar.

  7. It was elected ho-m.os-exuals who put anti-civil rights laws on the books in california. They put all the guns stores in San Francisco out of business. Forcing them to close.

    The gays and ath.eists voted for them. Just like the blacks vote for similar leadership in Memphis Tn and Chicago Illinois.

    But if you just leg.alize drugs, all the crime will go away. Then all your problems will be solved.

    And don’t forget to defund the police. You won’t need them when drugs are l.e.ga.liz.ed.