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A 10 year clerk in a convenience store was approached by a man with a knife who was ready to stab him and rob the store. The clerk pulled out a handgun and probably saved his own life.
He was on tv tonight and he seems like a perfectly nice, easy going guy who simply wanted to live and go home to his family rather than end up in a hospital or a coffin. He's not really angry and says he will just get another job.
Ordinarily I don't like the idea of people having guns, especially handguns. Too many chances for them to get into the wrong hands (like the hands of a crazy person or a young kid). The store fired him because they have a no gun policy. He was registered to carry a gun though. He did know about the no gun policy. I think IF I had to work in a convenience store AT NIGHT, when there had recently been other INCIDENTS, and I was AlONE, I would want something to protect myself. Is there anything else he could have done? Is there some sort of better protection that the management could put in place rather than just putting guys like this out there to get stabbed and robbed?
The employer should be publicly shamed for firing this guy for self-defending himself. In fact, their policy should be declared unconstitutional (violation of 2nd Amendment).
I've worked in convenience stores at night before. Sometimes I worked by myself. I didn't have a gun or money to buy one back then, so I kept a pry bar at hand. I also kept only a couple of dollars in the register. There were two times when I'm pretty sure I almost got robbed...once a guy walked in with his hand behind his back and said in a loud, aggressive voice, "give me--" and then stopped, because the armed guard who worked across the street was in the store, getting his free coffee (I gave him free coffee or fountain drinks all the time so he'd hang out in the store), and he took a step or two so he was visible to the guy, and he unsnapped his holster. "--an application," the guy finished. I gave him an application and he left.
The other time I was about to close up for the night and a young guy came in and leaned across the counter and said, "Be glad I'm in a good mood or I'd have to rob you tonight." I hit the no sale and popped the drawer up onto the counter...I had two one-dollar bills and a two-dollar bill which was actually a holdup alarm in the drawer. (I had the rest in a plastic bin under the register) "Go ahead," I told the guy, and he looked at the drawer and acted like it was a joke and left without buying anything. That night on the way home, I saw that the store two miles down the road had been robbed.
I did have to use my trusty prybar on someone once, a drunk who said he was going to rape me. He was drunk enough that his raping equipment probably wouldn't have worked, but I didn't take the chance. I hit him a couple of times on the shoulder and he left.
Anyhow, I don't blame the clerk for having a gun. Sometimes I worked with a coworker and some of them brought guns and would put them under the counter. The corporate stores I worked for always had policies against employees bringing guns and some of them would search employees randomly for guns. Not all of the stores I worked in had working cameras. It was actually more likely that the camera wouldn't be working than that it was working. The building alarms always worked though and the companies paid for monitoring, so I guess that's part of why robberies seemed to be more common than burglaries.
As far as protection for employees, everywhere I worked had a holdup button tied into the building alarm. It was a silent alarm that would send the police right away, but we were told not to use it if we were being robbed, because it was safer to let the robber leave the building before the police arrived, so that we weren't caught in a hostage situation. The only place I ever worked that wanted the holdup alarm pulled while the robber was still there was the one that had the alarm built into the till.
Gun versus knife. Rock beats scissors. Had it been gun versus gun, the probability of one or more people having been killed would have gone way up. There are reasons why operators of such outlets have no-guns policies and why they instruct employees not to resist and to call police once the robber has left the premises. Testosterone isn't typically a factor in wise decisions about much of anything.
I would find it very hard to "usually" be against or "usually" be for a constitutional amendment. Having a gun is not some arbitrary thing that was randomly tacked onto the consititution, and if the guys writing it would be able to see society today they would think "Gee, maybe if we knew society was gonna evolve so much we wouldn't have put that in there".
The 2nd amendment is how they secured the right to carry around the most modern technology they had at the time to employ force. This was done because everyone has the right and the responsibility to ensure their other rights are not taken by force. The rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You can't protect your freedom, your life or your pursuit of happiness without the implying that you also have the right to the force necessary to do it. Its not the governments responsibility to ensure any of those, its yours.
There are reasons why operators of such outlets have no-guns policies and why they instruct employees not to resist and to call police once the robber has left the premises.
Yup - they have those policies because they don't care about their employees at all.
If you watched the surveillance clip, you would have seen the clerk was about to get stabbed - whether he complied or not..
Convenience store clerk is the most dangerous occupation in America, (multiple times more dangerous than being a cop), and all the corporate stores prohibit employees from carrying guns.
Gun-free zones = easy pickings for dirtbags.
There's a reason that psychos pick gun-free zones to do their mass-shootings in instead of police stations..
The "go along with whatever the criminal says" mantra is outdated and wrong - believing you can save yourself by doing whatever a criminal tells you to do is a great way to die.
There's a wealth of criminal behavior research that shows that crime-scene #2 is *always* much worse than crime-scene #1. Criminals aren't going to let you call the cops mid-crime, so the only way to avoid being taken to crime-scene #2 is to fight.
personally, I dont agree with the FBI data being used for "talking points" - some of the gun-deaths were justifiable homicides committed by law-enforcement against maniacs & about half of all gun deaths are suicides.. truly suicidal people are going to find a way to leave this world, even if guns are completely banned.
More people are murdered by hammers than handguns every year.
The problem is not the guns... as your post shows.
Ok.....got any stats for that one?
Or do you mean more people get their heads bashed in by hammers than guns (meaning the death comes from blunt trama not bullets being shot out of the gun..aka lead poisoning).
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