"Lauderdale County Sheriff's investigator Travis Clemmons holds a 1919 Browning medium machine gun that was found in the mud by construction workers replacing the bridge over Cypress Creek on Rasch Road. The machine gun, which weighs 31 pounds, took at least a two-man team to carry along with all the equipment." -- Times Daily photo.
Alright. I'm getting sick and tired of this wasteful crap. Last year it was Bibb County. Now it's up near Florence. What profligacy! We're gonna need this stuff these morons are throwing in creeks soon enough.
Please! Do us all a favor. If you find a light machine gun in a creek and nobody's looking, don't turn it in. Take it home, give it some TLC and then stick it someplace the Feds will never think of looking.
Mike
III
What it looked like before being pitched in a creek for a few years. Sheesh!Construction crews find vintage machine gun
By Tom Smith
Senior Staff Writer
Published: Monday, April 5, 2010 at 3:30 a.m.
FLORENCE - Working in bridge construction, Paul Haralson has found some very interesting items while clearing debris from creeks and from under bridges.
But nothing compares to what he found a few weeks ago while working on the new bridge on Rasch Road.
"We had torn out the old bridge and were cleaning out the debris from the creek," said Haralson, owner of Shotcrete of America. "I was in the creek with a trackhoe scooping up the debris and clearing out the creek some. I had already made a couple of scoops with the bucket, and when I pulled the bucket up, there it was.
"Right there in the middle of the bucket pointing at me was a machine gun."
It was a Browning M1919 air-cooled machine gun - a weapon developed at the end of the World War I and used in World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars.
"Over the years, I've found bicycles, televisions, a motorcycle, tires and other things, but never a machine gun. I was surprised," Haralson said.
There was no doubt in his mind what the item was when he saw it.
"I could tell exactly what it was as soon as it came up in the bucket," he said with a laugh.
Members of Haralson's crew carefully unloaded the weapon and placed it in the back of his truck. Haralson drove to the sheriff's department and turned it over to Sheriff Ronnie Willis.
Willis said his office has been in touch with agents from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms about the weapon.
"No one has any idea of where it came from or how it got in the creek," Willis said.
The bridge, which crosses Little Cypress Creek, is the county's oldest. The 74-year-old structure is at the base of Rasch Hill.
Willis said he is hoping to clean the weapon enough to get a serial number from it, which could help provide more information.
"I'd love to know how it got in the creek. But that's anybody's guess," the sheriff said.
Haralson said it was stuck in the creek bed under a lot of mud and muck.
"It could have been stolen and thrown in the creek to hide; who knows," Willis said. "There's no telling how long the weapon has been in the creek."
According to the American Gunsmithing Institute, the weapon, in its heyday, would be placed on a tripod and required two- or three-man teams to operate. The weapon was carried by a gunner and the tripod and ammunition carried by the other members of the team.
The weapon also could be placed on a swivel on a Jeep or other vehicle.
"It's definitely a conversation piece around the office," Willis said. "It would be interesting to try and track its history. Who knows where the gun has been or where it was used."
Haralson said the gun must have been in the creek for several years because it was so deep in the mud.
"And it could have been there a lot of longer if we hadn't been working on replacing the bridge," he said. "There's hundreds of creeks throughout the county, and there's no telling what's been thrown in them. This just goes to show, you never know what you can find in a creek."
Tom Smith can be reached at 740-5757 or tom.smith@TimesDaily.com.
16 comments:
HEH... Maybe there was an issue and an underground fault pushed it up from that old mine shaft it was hidden in? :)
Wait the article said 1919 didn't it...damn
Soooo not fair!
http://bluejaunte.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/tactical_facepalm.jpg
No expert here. Looks like the 1919 was mounted on a tri pod.
Not on a by pod.
what say all of you experts?
10:1 it was dumped when the laws to register them was enacted. Shame really. I wonder how many more there are that are sitting in the bottoms of rivers, lakes and quarries around the country.
An A6 no less... What a shame.
Picture shows what looks to be a tripod peg on it. God that is just a sin to do something like that to that beautiful MG.
I have lusted for one of those most of my adult life. I would die before I threw it off a bridge. Dumb ass that did it should be keel-hauled and whipped with a cat-o-nine.
Very sad .... very sad.
wtf ya hicks doing ,,,, must have been infiltrated by yankees...
I am speechless. Who would do such a dumd thing to a good gun. III
Perhaps WE should start exploring the areas around the bridges first!!!!
I agree with alla y'all.
It's heartbreaking initially that some waste of air tossed that fine piece into a creek. To think that this bozo found this gun and gave it away, to the Sheriff's Dept, of all people?
Insult gets added to injury. What an effin' fool! Dumbass. GRRR!
I woulda taken it home and cared for it like a fine purebred but homeless dog that I had run across.
'Course, common sense is a rare commodity nowadays...
Depending of how quickly it was encased in mud. The chemical nature of the mud. It could have been there for years not months. Some places in Russia you can pull WWII guns out of the ground restock them and shoot them that day.
I knew somebody who found a baritone saxophone in a lake (almost as deadly) But a machine gun??
I was having fun imaging neat places to "stick it." [evil grin] Only those guns that could not be restored to active duty, of course.
Whoever dumped that beautiful example of John Browning's genius is a perfect example of someone who is too stupid to live but unfortunately illegal to hunt.
Crying damn shame. Mike's right. woulda come in handy in a few months.
Ya'll can keep bashing us Yankees all you want. I can guarantee that you won't find machine guns or anything else that shoots in the water. I have never known a person up here in the North that would do such a thing. So lets knock off the references to Yankees gang.... been a long time ago and none of us were alive then. We are all Americans.
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