Guns Scare Me

Tonight Stacey and I decided to walk downtown for dumplings. Just after we walked past the corner market I noticed a man learning oddly into the backseat of a Jetta. It looked like he was stretching or doing yoga.

As we walked past the car I saw it wasn’t yoga–he was kneeing a man in the back seat in the groin.

There was at least one other man in the back of the car, apparently trying to keep the victim inside.

On the far side of a car a small crowd had gathered to watch the fight. They’d probably heard the guy screaming as he was getting hit in the crotch.

I’d slowed down to get a better look when the yoga guy pulled a pistol out of his waistband.

This is when things start to get blurry. Literally; my vision blurred and everything got very bright. Stacey yelled “Gun!”, grabbed my arm, and started to run. I tried to get behind a van. I looked back and saw the gun against the victim’s head. The man with the gun said, “I’ll fucking shoot you.” I heard him cock the hammer. All I could think was that I didn’t want to see some guy get shot, or get shot myself.

An old man sitting on a stoop next to us laughed.
“Scared?”

I never heard a shot. We walked away as fast as we could and didn’t look back. At the gate to the park we went inside and tried to look inconspicuous.Even now I have no idea what the hell was going on. As far as I know, handgun ownership is illegal in China. It seems unlikely that a crowd would gather to watch criminals beat and kidnap someone, so perhaps it was the police. There are lots of officers in plain clothes driving unmarked cars, so it may just have been a violent arrest.
Michael tried to convince us that we saw part of a TV show being filmed. This is the theory that’s probably least likely to be true, but the one I’d like to believe the most. If I’m immortalized in China as looking terrified and running away from a TV shoot, that’s worth not having seen someone’s life threatened.