Rationalization is the easy part; the "right thing" is the hard part
Willie,
You hit it right on the head here. Rick did the right thing by contacting the buyer and giving her cue back. To make it sound like Rick has as big a part in the wrong doing by not running a stolen cue check prior to buying the cue is ludicrous and simply wrong.
I bought a gun at a pawn shop awhile back. It looked like one hell of a buy, so I bought it. The pawn shop has been in Phoenix for forty years. I took the gun to my gunsmith, as I got an offer to buy it almost immediately, so I wanted to make sure everything checked out before I sold it to a friend. When I got to the gunsmith's place, he saw the gun and immediately recognized it as a stolen gun that had been owned by one of his customers. He called his customer and he met us in the shop with the police in tow.
The guy tried to make me feel like a criminal even though I produced a receipt from the pawn shop. He wanted me to give him the gun back even though I had spent several hundred dollars to buy it. When all was said and done, there was no record of the stolen gun because the guy had done so many modifications to it that when it was taken, the guy sent in the wrong serial number, which was from one of the modified parts, for the police report. The cop said it was my gun, as far as he was concerned and left the premises. My gunsmith looked the guy in the face and said that if he didn't pay me for the gun, he would find out who he'd had it insured with and make sure they knew he had gotten it back so they could recoup their loss after paying him off. I at least got my money back, but it took a threat. Was I wrong for buying a stolen gun from a reputable pawn shop with correct papers even though it turned out stolen?
Now I know you're thinking that this was a unique situation and that I should have suspected theft due to the low price. Well, I got a Colt .45 from the same pawn shop, and now I was a little concerned because, once again, the price was "too good to be true". I was getting a $2,500 gun for $500. They had the guy they bought the gun from call me and he told me the reason he sold it so cheap was that the guy's grandfather had passed it down to him and he HATED GUNS (he almost shouted this fact at me). He sold the gun to the pawn shop for $50 just to get it out of his house. Fortunately, I have enough history with the pawn shop that they took the gun out of inventory until I had talked to the previous owner, or I guarantee that someone would have bought it before I would have had the chance.
I have been fortunate to have had some very good deals on cues throughout the years. Some were because of divorce, or death in the family, or simply that the person was getting out of pool. There are legitimate reasons why you can find a good deal once in awhile.
Cue dealers have to keep their costs as low as possible these days to make any kind of profit. Background checks and such (if available...and they're not)would certainly add to their costs and would be passed on to the end user in a market that won't bear additional costs.
All in all, you must exercise diligence not to buy goods that one knows or expects might be stolen, but to suggest that Rick was a large part of the problem
? If someone had offered him the Cog for $50, he should have been suspicious, but $3,300 is a chunk of change in anybody's book and wouldn't have raised any red flags with me.
Rick is my friend and I don't expect you would know why your threads are so insulting, as you don't buy into anything that you don't perceive as "reality" (and the ever-popular "he's a really nice guy and would never buy a stolen cue" arguments), but that ever popular argument says it all about Rick.
Life's too short to be paranoid about everything and everyone. There are bad people out there, but there are also good ones, too. It pays to know which is which, and this time you couldn't be more off base...
Regards,
Steve Feld
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