Man Orders TV, Gets AR-15 Delivered Instead

It’s kind of exciting to come home from work and see a brown package sitting on your front door step. Usually, it provokes one of two reactions. If you’re the type of person who rarely shops online, then you probably think, “Ohh! My thing is finally here!” If you’re the type of person who does online shopping all of the time, your first thought is likely, “I wonder what it could be. It’s like Christmas in the middle of the year!”

Seth Horvitz of Washington, DC was in the first category. He was looking forward to the TV and knew the second he saw the big, brown package sitting outside his door that something was wrong.

Something’s Not Right Here

The package was long and slender rather than wide and flat. “The package didn’t match the shape,” Horvitz told DCist in an interview.

He flagged down the UPS driver and asked him if there were other packages addressed to him that went along with this one, but the deliveryman explained that he only had one package with Horvitz’s name on it.

Hmm, how puzzling.

The only way to solve that mystery was to break open the box. Horvitz recalled the event, “Even as I opened it there were some metal parts and I thought, ‘Oh, maybe these go with the TV?’ And then of course as I opened the foam up a little further, it was kind of a huge shock to see that this was a military-grade rifle.”

More precisely, it was a Swiss-made Sig Sauer SIG716 AR-15 with a total length of 37 inches – just two inches off from the 39-inch LED TV Horvitz was expecting.

Possession of an Illegal Firearm — Accidentally

That presented Horvitz with something of an ethical conundrum. What do you do with a high-powered rifle that isn’t yours and is illegal to own? The rifle has a suggested retail price of $2,132, nearly seven times the price of the $320 TV he ordered, so it might have been tempting to do something unethical and keep or resell the pricey gun.

To his credit, he did the most sensible thing he could: he called the cops. He knew that simply owning a gun like this was illegal in the District of Columbia and that transporting it in a car was also illegal, so he just stepped back and let the cops come and confiscate it.

But Where’s My TV?-[source]