[Rick Lee]

Where did this happen? I haven't seen such aggressive panhandling before in the US, only in other countries.

I had lunch with a customer last week, who works for a gun lobby, and we got to talking about how he got into that kind of work. He was attacked in Vegas by a group of Crips with baseball bats on initiation day. His car had broken down and he was in the parking lot of a car parts store with his GF in the front seat. He disarmed the first one to come at him and hit the kid so hard that he's now a vegetable. The rest took off and the cops took my my buddy along on the chase, as they had been looking for this crew for a while. My buddy was able to ID them all and testified to get them sent away for a long time. No charges against him for his work on the first one that came after him.