If I were a betting man, I’d wager that a brief Page One story out of the Kennebec County town of Vienna was probably the most discussed item in the morning newspaper one day last week.

Headlined “Shotgun greets Maine metal thieves,” the article described how the owner of a machine shop from which thieves had previously stolen thousands of dollars worth of scrap metal had dramatically brought things to a screeching halt.

Mad as hell about the deal, and not about to take it any more, the shop owner, shotgun at the ready, was waiting when the thieves returned – as he suspected they might – to cart off more of his property.

When he came upon a pickup truck parked near his building with some of his scrap metal loaded in the bed, the Vienna man opened fire on the truck, shooting out its windshield and blasting its radiator and tires, according to Kennebec County Sheriff Randall Liberty. The crooks took off on foot, but investigators easily tracked down the female driver and went about filing charges.

After things had quieted down, the sheriff said he strongly discourages the use of a gun to protect property. The shop owner’s spin on the incident was somewhat different, as might be expected from a person who has had his property so brazenly and repeatedly ripped off.

“I think I did the town a favor,” the man told an Associated Press reporter, and by an overwhelming margin readers of this newspaper agreed that not only had he done that, he had made their day as well. It came as no surprise that 96 percent of 1,364 readers who responded to a BDN online poll concerning the matter said they thought the Vienna man was justified in his actions.

With apologies to songwriter Bob Dylan and his immortal line about not needing a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, when it comes to a Mainer’s stance on dealing with thieves you can be pretty sure that about 96 percent of the time the wind will blow in the direction that the BDN poll result indicated. Rotsa ruck to the defendants in the Vienna theft case should the matter ever come to trial before a jury.

One piece of information in the AP story that fairly jumped off the page and into my news clipping file was that the pickup truck which the Vienna patriot riddled with buckshot was a 2008 model. It occurred to me that something was wrong with this picture, and it wasn’t that the property owner had taken matters into his own hands.

The rule of thumb among politicians out hustling votes used to be that one should never go campaigning in a Cadillac – a principle that also applied to itinerant peddlers of everything from patent medicine to Fuller brushes to newspaper advertising.

Wise old pros counseled that if, in pursuit of Joe Sixpack’s vote in the upcoming election – or, hoping to sell him something more tangible – you drove into his modest dooryard in a big luxury car you could pretty much kiss the vote and-or the sale goodbye. The theory was that the targets of your affection might reasonably conclude that, given your obvious affluent status in society, you certainly didn’t need their modest help. And so there you were.

And now I learn that the modern-day thief commutes to the scene of the crime in a pricey brand new 2008 pickup truck? What will they arrive in next, a stretch limo? Whatever happened to employing, for looting purposes, a rusted-out clunker, circa 1972, held together with baling wire and Bondo and enhanced by a hound dawg and an empty old 55-gallon oil drum bouncing around in the back? At least the crook might plausibly argue, when nabbed, that he or she needed the cash from the sale of the stolen goods more than the owner did – a defense that would seem to be pretty much ruled out should he operate from a shiny truck just off the showroom floor.

The moral of the story seems clear: Just as politicians should never go campaigning in a Cadillac, thieves should never go plundering in a brand new truck.

Sometimes it works out, and they can use their ill-gotten profits to make a payment on their new toy, thereby keeping the finance company’s repo man at bay. But sometimes the toy gets all stove up by an irate property owner while 96 percent of the population applauds enthusiastically from the sidelines.

Maine: The way life should be.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.