[Bearing Arms] Being a customer in a business being robbed is pretty scary. When you’re armed, it takes on an added dimension, though. A thousand questions likely run through your mind, including the possibility of what happens if you don’t draw and fire your weapon. It doesn’t mean you don’t act, necessarily, but it may well play a role in your head before acting.One question you don’t have the luxury of getting answered first, even if you have time to think it, is whether the gun is a firearm or a BB gun.
In a Georgia Waffle House over the weekend, an armed citizen acted to stop an armed robbery. The suspect’s weapon was, well, suspect.
Now, it becomes easy for people to sit here after the fact and lament the fact that someone was shot for having a BB gun, but that’s not what happened.
This person was shot because he was trying to threaten and bully his way into the cash register of a business that earned that money. The fact that it was a BB gun and not a real firearm is irrelevant. No one knew that when the citizen acted, and no one can blame him for assuming that it was a real gun.
After all, the criminal in question banked on people believe it to be a real firearm. That was his purpose in taking it into the restaurant in the first place. He wanted people to think he was armed.
And they did.