Understatement of the year. (One of them, anyway.)

In late November, Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis cop (make that former cop) who was convicted of the murder of George Floyd, was stabbed by a fellow inmate at the federal prison in Tucson, Arizona where he's been serving time. 

Not that I have a ton of sympathy for Chauvin - a bad cop if ever - but no inmate's life should be endangered while in prison. And I feel the same way about two local, entirely execrable characters who were killed while doing time. That would be murderous psychopath Whitey Bulger and child rapist/molester priest John Geoghan, both hideously murdered in prison. 

Just awful.

And I feel the same way about Chauvin, who was grievously injured but survived.

Chauvin’s stabbing is the second high-profile attack on a federal prisoner in the last five months. In July, disgraced sports doctor Larry Nassar was stabbed by a fellow inmate at a federal penitentiary in Florida. (Source: Boston Globe)

I'm pretty sure it's pretty easy to make yourself a knife - a shiv, a shank - in prison. Inmates have a lot of free time, and a honed toothbrush makes a pretty formidable weapon. 

But it's not just knives that are used to mete out what passes for prison justice. Whitey Bulger was beaten to death by an inmate using a sock loaded with a padlock. John Geoghan was strangled and stomped to death. In the hands (or feet) of someone intent on doing grave harm, anything at hand - or at foot - can be weaponized. 

And then there are guns in prison. As in an earlier incident in Tucson:

[Chauvin's stabbing] is also the second major incident at the Tucson federal prison in a little over a year. In November 2022, an inmate at the facility’s low-security prison camp pulled out a gun and attempted to shoot a visitor in the head. The weapon, which the inmate shouldn’t have had, misfired and no one was hurt.

It may be easier to craft a shiv in prison, but it's apparently easy enough to create a gun, even if you don't have access to a 3D printer to maker-make your ghost gun.

If you're in prison, chances are you're a tough guy. Bored, nothing better to do, often accustomed to violence on both the giving and receiving end. Why not zip up a zip gun?

But for a reporter to write about a prison gun that "the inmate shouldn't have had" it? Shouldn't have had it? Ya think?