It’s just a darn shame that Tom Roth was out moose hunting last weekend rather than visiting kin on Pownal Road in Auburn.

When it comes to drive-by shootings, the former Auburn police lieutenant has a zero tolerance policy — or at least that’s how I remember it from a night in 1998 when the man almost single-handedly chased down a pair of shooters who had taken aim at his in-laws’ house on Cook Street.

The drive-by shooting on Pownal Road over the weekend was outrageous.

As a man and woman sat in their living room on the bucolic edge of the city, bullets came ripping through a window before punching into a wall behind them.

Yes, it was that dramatic.

“We heard glass shattering, and my husband yelled, ‘Get down!'” the lady of the house later wrote on Facebook. “He and I jumped down to the floor and I called 911 while I was crouched down on my hands and knees in my own living room, fearing for our lives!”

Witnesses would later report hearing two sharp gunshots followed by the sound of a pickup truck speeding away into the night, headed toward Durham.

Inside their now bullet-riddled home, the couple was unhurt, although had the bullets taken a slightly different trajectory, this might have been an uglier and bloodier affair.

Their son was sleeping in an upstairs bedroom at the time, after all. And one of the bullets reportedly missed the man of the house by inches.

It’s still pretty ugly as is.

There are two possibilities here and both are alarming. Either the shooter took aim specifically at this Pownal Road family or the shooting was entirely random.

Police believe that the shooting was random, and what can you say about someone who will spray rounds into the living room of a house having no idea whatsoever who might be occupying the sofas and chairs therein?

I think we can all agree that this shooter needs to be captured sooner than later.

Which is why it’s a real pity that Tom Roth wasn’t nearby when it all went down.

On an early evening in November 1998, Roth was an off-duty police sergeant hanging out with his in-laws at their Cook Street home.

There was the sound of a car slowing outside. There was the sound of a pellet striking a window and then the suspect car was speeding away.

In seconds, Roth was jumping into his wife’s Honda Accord and giving chase and by that point, the fate of the two shooters was more or less sealed.

Let me tell you something. Tom Roth, when he was a police officer, was an imposing figure. The man was roughly 9 feet tall and generally huge, but unless you were on the wrong side of the law, he was great fun to work with.

The two teens — who actually drove back to the scene of the shooting at one point to retrieve a piece of their crappy pellet gun — were not going to have great fun.

So mere moments after the shots had been fired, the chase was on. Roth, in his wife’s Accord, was barely keeping up with the Saturn being driven at full throttle by the suspects, but the police sergeant had an advantage that would ultimately do the shooters in.

A police radio.

“They were pulling away from me like I was standing still,” Roth says now. “However, the radio is always faster than the car.”

As the Saturn wound its way through the neighborhood trying to shake the scary cop behind them, Roth alerted a police dispatcher of the situation.

Not far away, Officer Jason Moore — now a lieutenant, by the way — was in his cruiser at Hackett Road and Broad Street. Moore heard the call and when he saw the Saturn whiz by, all he had to do was switch on his blue lights to bring the bumbling shooters to heel.

Big Tom Roth came wheeling up soon after. To this day, I wish I could see the looks upon the faces of those two kids as Roth’s massive frame unfolded from that Honda Accord.

Inside the Saturn, police found a pellet gun, pellets and CO2 cartridges. It turned out the teens, Edward Little High School students and cadets in a law enforcement program, had been shooting up houses in similar fashion for weeks.

The Pownal Road shooting on Saturday night was significantly more serious than that teenage hooliganism back in 1998, no doubt. For one thing, instead of much weaker pellets, live rounds were fired into the home, with death or serious injury avoided by mere inches.

And for another, this shooter, if this shooter is blasting in a truly random fashion, is a threat to every one of us.

In a community that was shut down for days by a mass shooter just two years ago, and one that is rattled by inner-city gunfire even still, it is a menace.

Those with information should call Auburn police Detective Dennis Matthews at 333-6650 ext. 2059.

Or the shooter could spare us all the tension of a long investigation by turning himself in, either out of remorse or just plain fear.

After all, although Tom Roth isn’t a police officer anymore, legend has it that he’s still out there, huge as ever, roaming the land and just itching to bring drive-by shooters to swift and decisive justice.

It could be just an urban legend, sure.

But why risk it?