You know, if you read everything on this thread and worried about it, you might think that the world is one very dangerous place.

A Georgia woman was jailed Friday after police say she forced her son to kill his pet hamster with a hammer as punishment for bad grades.

Details.

So the son would have a duress excuse for cruelty to a non-livestock animal, but surely the mother would be guilty as a party...

Alexandria police said man stopped for riding his bicycle at night without a headlight was carrying a weapon made from a butcher knife attached to a pool cue.

Details.

[Perhaps A.P. could help us understand the origin of such a weapon.]

Obviously he is a relative of Bad, Bad Leroy Brown the famous pool cue wielder from the South side of Chicago. The article failed to mention the inscription on the cue, referencing portions of the script from Paul Newman's "The Hustler." Crack pipe users and pool cue-spear users, should unite against such an atrocity.
Exit Only, stage left

Perhaps the butcher knife was simply a handy way to help him cut his sandwich in half without interrupting a game of pool?

A Jourdanton man was killed early Friday after he was shocked by 69,000 volts of electricity as officials said he was stealing copper wire from an Atascosa County substation.

Details.

[Or maybe, more accurately, ignorance of how electricity works.]

It was two days before Christmas when Jason Bou chard went to Walmart, like countless other shoppers, looking for the perfect item.
But rather than the ideal gift, Bouchard says, he was searching for the best tool for killing the mother of his children.

Details.

But not in Britain!

Brits toast new shatterproof pint glass

The shatterproof pint glass was proudly unveiled by the government on Thursday. Officials swore the country would save billions in health care costs by coming up with a glass that doesn't double as a lethal weapon.

But noticeably, no officials were talking about reforming the British binge drinking culture at the root of the problem.

There are about 87,000 alcohol-related glass attacks each year, with many resulting in hospital visits, Home Secretary Alan Johnson said as he introduced the two prototype shatterproof pint glasses.

Ya see, mate, we don't got no guns, so we gotta get creative like. Glasses ova a head are smashin' fun after a game o' socca an a bitta drinkin'.

Ya know, John, I'd almost believe you really were still British, except you called it socca, not football. You have assimilated!

It's Brit slang for "sock ya". It's what they call a bar fight.

I'm just amused that this was an important enough problem that the government had to design the new glasses.

A glass that won't break makes for a pretty good deadly weapon too.

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling �My Way� in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the �My Way Killings.�

Details.

Thief robs arcade with cup of coffee

BERLIN (Reuters) - A thief in the German town of Hamelin robbed an amusement arcade by threatening the attendant with a cup of coffee, authorities said on Tuesday.

Brandishing the steaming cup he had just ordered, the thief forced the 26-year-old to open the till and fled with cash.

A man released from prison in December is back in custody this morning after he admitted killing his live-in girlfriend Saturday at their north Houston home after he tired of her "nagging." [What a great Valentine's Day story, eh?]

Details.

Ah, love.

My other thoughts: What was he in prison for to begin with? Was it something "nonviolent?" How much of his original sentence did he serve? Why weren't those details reported?

Found the link to "Full Story" and guess what? He had been in the pokey on charges of narcotics trafficking. Clearly, not a danger to society.

Full story (not that there's much more than before)

Chinese Democracy. Worst Album Ever.

Skid Row singer stops knife-wielding man at Guns N' Roses show

Former Skid Row rocker Sebastian Bach was hailed a hero at a Guns N' Roses gig on Feb. 14 after he stopped a knife-wielding man from approaching his close friend Axl Rose.

Details

An official says 40-year-old Dawn Brancheau is the trainer killed by a whale at SeaWorld in Orlando.

Details.

[And later in the same story, an entry for a different thread: "At the Orlando SeaWorld, the body of a naked man was found draped over a 5-ton orca named Tilikum in July 1999."]