Gun-toting granny > The supposed news story reproduced above about a “Rambo Granny” taking the law into her own hands is a fanciful tale of imagined revenge and nothing more. It originated as a 20 October 1998 article published in the Weekly World News, an entertainment tabloid (now a web site) whose stock in trade is the fantastically fictional.

Grambo exists only in our hearts and inboxes. Although some may cherish her story anyway, it’s an unlikely tale of vigilante justice in which a police spokesman is characterized as “admiring” of someone who stalked and shot two people.

As righteous as the fictional Grambo’s cause might have been, the moment a crime victim or one of her sympathizers takes matters into her own hands, that person becomes a criminal engaged in illegal activity. Police would not be “baffled” about what to do with such a person: they’d arrest her and let the legal system sort out what charges to lay against her and how to punish her.

Okay, so we can’t believe the story. Many of us still want to, though.