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Police Find Nearly 1,000 Baseball Bats in Cars Over Weekend

Baseball bats having become an increasingly common sight in Moscow motorists' trunks. mairead

Traffic police said Tuesday that they had found 912 baseball bats during vehicle searches conducted in the capital in the first four days of November.

Since the beginning of the month, traffic police have inspected a total of 10,773 vehicles.

Apart from baseball bats, they found 184 traumatic guns, as well as four pieces of firearms, which were improperly stored or transported. They also found 331 knives, according to the list of items published on the traffic police's official site.

In all cases when dangerous items were found, police asked drivers about their origins and purposes. It was not immediately clear from the report whether police actually confiscated any of the weapons.

In a similar operation conducted last month that saw 21,000 cars searched over a period of five days, police discovered 1,461 baseball bats, 449 knives, 395 traumatic weapons and 19 firearms.

Although baseball is not a very popular sport in Russia, bats seem to be a preferred weapon among local drivers because they are not subject to the restrictions normally applied to weapons.

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