As we've seen many times, it is rarely a good idea to take the law into your own hands, even in response to the most dastardly outrages such as an inexplicable condiment omission. And yet it continues to happen.
On Saturday in Lee's Summit, Missouri, 30-year-old Jeremy Combs allegedly returned to a Taco Bell from which he had just ordered, upset because no hot sauce had been provided in his to-go order. And if the allegations turn out to be true, you could replace "upset" in that sentence with "wielding a 12-gauge shotgun."
The details are a little sparse in this report, which says Combs returned to the restaurant, gave the bag back to the employee and "reached for his shotgun," whereupon the employee "jumped out the drive-through window." If the employee jumped out the window, then obviously Combs was inside the restaurant. But if he was inside and not in a car in the drive-through lane, where did he "reach for his shotgun"? Did he have an accomplice? Did he hide the shotgun down his pant leg? Why is anyone in the Kardashian family famous? So many unanswered questions.
Police tracked Combs down and arrested him. He denied having a shotgun and claimed he had pointed a tire iron at the employee instead. I would guess that even a Taco Bell employee could tell the difference between a tire iron and a 12-gauge shotgun, at least if it was pointed at him, plus Combs has a reason to deny waving a gun because he is a convicted felon. (They aren't supposed to have guns.) But that's his story. If convicted on the hot-sauce-related charges he could get up to 10 years.
I was sure that I had reported on another hot-sauce incident at Taco Bell, but could not locate that post. I decided I had confused it with either the armed standoff in San Antonio that was triggered by an unexpected price rise for Beefy Crunch Burritos, or the 911 call a Florida woman made to report that her local McDonald's had run out of McNuggets. The second one didn't involve Taco Bell, but I did suggest that 911 calls should be saved "for a real emergency, like if a Taco Bell runs out of hot sauce or something like that" (emphasis added). Is that frigging eerie or what?
Still convinced I remembered a similar incident, I pressed on, and finally found it. Yes, it was at Wendy's, not Taco Bell; and yes, it involved chili sauce, not hot sauce (if these are two different things). But the important thing is that somebody pulled a gun based on an alleged condiment infraction. I think we can all agree on that.
