This was given to me by a friend today, who had visited a recent Mardi Gras parade. His girlfriend found it while randomly scavenging around.
It originally had a red rubber band on it, but that ended up cut and lost, hence the regular rubber band to keep it closed. Thankfully it was never used though.
Alright, let's say someone did want to throw things at Mardi gras to hurt people
The cheapest mechanical broad heads I can find (which aren't this model) are about $16 for 10. Granted I didn't look too hard, it could be there are cheaper ones out there, but most that I can find cost about that much or more for maybe 3-6 heads, so that's probably pretty close to the bottom of the barrel.
For that same money, you could have easily gotten hundreds of razor blades, nails, broken bottles, all kinds of little throwable sharp and pointy objects, and caused a lot more chaos.
And you found one. That doesn't exactly scream that someone was throwing these around the parade route intending to cause harm, they probably would have thrown a few of them, and if they were you probably would have heard about it.
At the very least, you found it with the rubber band still on it they probably would have at least removed that before throwing it if that was their plan. Some cheaper broadhead are designed so that that band will break or be cut when it enters a deer allowing it to open up, just tossing one into a crowd wouldn't exactly guarantee that it would open.
More likely, I'm thinking someone's box of archery equipment got knocked over in their car/truck, a stray broadhead got away from them were cleaning up and fell out onto the ground.
Or maybe they threw it out for one reason or another and their trash can got knocked over
Or it worked its way loose from an arrow while they were carrying gear to or from their car and fell off.
Never attribute to malice what can be equally explained by incompetence.