Police say two men were killed by a gas station clerk during an attempted robbery Monday night in northeast Ohio that left the clerk wounded in both legs.
Authorities say three armed, masked men rushed into a Marathon gas station in Canton shortly before 9:30 p.m., triggering a shootout. Officers found two of the men lying on the ground near the station. They were later pronounced dead at a hospital.
A gunfight is never a good thing to be in, and the wounds in both legs show the peril. He could have been killed, and thankfully he wasn’t.
The anti-gun cult will say that if he just let the men take what they wanted, he might have come out unharmed. He MIGHT have, but I’ve covered lots of robberies where the clerk complied with the robbers and got killed, either to eliminate witnesses or the even more insane reality that sometimes if the till is smaller than the robber had hoped for he’ll be so pissed off that the clerk gets killed for it.
One thing to say is if robbers are given carte blanche when they threaten force it gives a level of acceptance to this behavior that somewhat legitimizes this sort of activity. I don’t have much faith in the prison system to rehabilitate criminals. What I do suspect is that third guy who knows his buddies are sleeping in the morgue will think twice before robbing somebody again. He may continue to be a criminal, but breaking into parked cars is a step in the right direction to sticking guns in the faces of innocent people.
“somewhat legitimizes this sort of activity” hits the nail on the head.
Two additional things to consider.
1) The just give them what they want! Is the antis telling people to yeild their agency and trust their physical well being to the moral restraint of the very people who are using the threat of lethal force to, at best, steal their stuff.
Again, it’s the criminal that has the judgement here, that decides the amount of voilence and so on.
But despite this the antis don’t see them as *responsible*.
Which brings the second point.
2) Escallation. The antis always harp on how if the victim has a gun, if the victim fights back then they are “escallating” the situation. And that *that* is definitionally *worse*. Again, the agressor, the one who is expressly using voilence to steal (property, life, ect) isn’t to blame. No it’s the victim.
Thus the exchange “Your money or your life” is legitimate, while the response “How about you leave or you get shot” is *not* legitimate. Just look at how they see a dead attacker as worse than a beaten victim.
To the antis the criminal has sole agency while the victim has the responsibility, the duty, to “not make waves”.
Anti-Freedom, Pro Ignorance, Pro-Criminal. They are not “Anti-gun”, the guns just get in the way of their agenda.
Don’t forget aristocratic, classist, and elitist!
See a the wealthy and famous and connected are just more important. They can get carry permits in places like NYC, where the poor can’t.
Thus a well-heeled friend of the Mayor has better “legitimate need” to get a carry permit than some single-mom working the graveyard in a gas station.
I keep hearing that song from ‘Firefly’:
The hero of Canton/ The man they call… (doesn’t say what his name was though.)
The Man With No Name?