I used to collect old police shooting medals, and I still have a couple of hundred of them, carefully packed away in a large box. The thing is, I'm not really sure why I began the collection, never having been either a civilian cop or a particular gun enthusiast.

I remember seeing some like those I later began to collect, at a flea market in San Diego, back in the mid-'70s, priced at probably about five bucks each, and I thought they were really cool, but my budget in those days didn't permit me to buy them.

Then, shortly after discovering eBay, about eleven years ago, I was just surfing around the site one night and saw a half-dozen incredibly cool-looking, vintage police shooting medals about to end for only five or six bucks each, and on impulse I bought them. I haven't looked at them in years, but I remember that some go back to the early '30s, and were sponsored by Chicago newspapers. Some I had to bid fairly high on, like the 1940s White House Police medals. There are some real oddities, too, like the (probably '50s vintage) shooting medal from some obscure government agency, exact name forgotten, but something like "Atomic Energy Security Force".

Some of my more active collections, currently, are resin and ceramic superhero statues, virtually anything having to do with Tarzan or Zorro, and posters and lobby cards from those (mostly) terrible old Italian sword-and-sandal films of the late '50s - early '60s, in addition to dvds of the films themselves.