Buy a Car - Get a Free Gun?

Recently we purchased a new vehicle.  A used mini-van from a dealership that told us they received it during a trade-in from old people.  The condition of the van, and the miles on the odometer, supported the case that the van was owned by old people.  I mean how many miles can you put on a car driving to McDonald's every morning?

About a week after owning it, Cari was in the driveway vacuuming and cleaning the car.  We were trying to decide how long it takes before you stop treating a new car like a new car.  When do you stop being obsessed about every speck of dirt inside your car?

It was about that moment when Cari stood up from the passenger side and said, "I found a gun."
I wasn't sure what to think about that.  Surely she mis-identified whatever it was.  I walked over and looked on the floor in front of the passenger seat.

I'm not sure what I expected to see when I looked into the car.  I don't have a lot of experience with guns, but I was sure this was one.

The hammer was cocked back and I wasn't sure of the best way of handling the gun initially.   Our youngest daughter happened to be outside during this and she had followed me over to the car.  She clearly doesn't have a lot of experience with guns at 5 years old but she agreed.  There was a gun in the car.   She looked at me and asked, "Is that a shooting gun?"  I asked her to go inside while Cari and I figured out what we had.

Of course the next thing we did was pull out a cell phone and start taking pictures of it to post on Twitter.  That's how you handle things these days.  Nothing is official until you have taken its photo with an iPhone and put it on social media.

Right away we were getting offers from people that wanted to buy it from us.  Before we sold and shipped this weapon that was probably used in a murder we had to decide if it was armed or not.  We ejected the clip and noticed it was not loaded.   We also noticed that the clip was designed to hold small spherical ammunition.

This was an air-soft gun.  A very nice air-soft gun that was nearly made of all metal.  It's also gas powered, making it semi-automatic.

Now that we ruled out that our new gun was used to murder several dozen people we decided to take a closer look at it.  The next question we asked is why were old people riding around in a mini-van with an air-soft gun under the seat?  Elderly hoodlums shooting up their neighbors working in the garden?  Trying to intimidate Girl Scouts?  It didn't seem to match the rest of the story.   I now have this image of granny firing plastic pellets at the McDonald's drive thru.

Meanwhile the youngest was inside the house telling the other kids that we now had a shooting gun.
This prompted a few more kids coming outside to see what all the excitement was about.

I have since taken it to a local air-soft store where they checked it out for me and showed me that it works (very well).  The safety is broken on the gun and I left it with them to have it repaired.

That will buy me a few days to make some targets for practice with my new shooting gun.