extralarge

A shooting  in Gage Park, in Southwest Chicago, illustrates why gun control activists resisted legal concealed carry in the Windy City as long as they did. Earlier this week, a legally carrying customer of a currency exchange store shot and killed an armed robber who was attempting a holdup while the owner’s two teenage sons were working there. To understand why civilian disarmament types hate the idea of concealed carry permits, you just have to read the comments of some of the other merchants in the area . . .

DNAinfo quotes the boys’ mother and store owner:

“All I know is that someone came in here threatening my sons, and this angel used a gun he was allowed to carry, and he saved them,” Cabrales said.

From the owner of a store two doors away:

“I don’t believe in vigilante justice, but I don’t know what would have happened if that guy hadn’t been there,” Guzman said. “I mean, the same thing could just as easily have happened to my store.”

From a shop owner down the block, who was robbed a month ago:

“I do trust the police, but lately I really haven’t felt safe here,” Vidales said. “I never like violence, but in [this] case, I think he did the right thing. I’m glad he was there.

And from another nearby business owner:

“Seeing that happen right on this block makes me think I’d feel much better if I were armed, and if my customers were armed,” Cruz said. “Now I want to get a concealed carry permit myself.”

Bingo. The successful implementation of shall issue concealed carry in most of the country has resulted in thousands of stories like this featuring the successful use of firearms to defend the carrier and others. Most of the time no shots are fired, no one is hit, and no one is so much as injured.

When an aggressor is killed, though, the shooting isn’t always recorded in the FBI uniform crime reports (UCR) as a justified shooting. That’s because the FBI requires that a report of a felony accompany the report of a justified shooting. There was no robbery in this case because the robbery was stopped. That’s one of the reasons why the FBI UCR severely under reports justified homicides.

Concealed carry license holders undercut the narrative that anti-gunners have been trying to build in the national psyche for decades. You’ve heard it often enough: Guns are bad. Guns cause crime. Guns are useless for self defense. You’re more likely to get shot with your own gun.

However, when people see concrete examples that contradict that narrative, they change their minds. Mr. Cruz, the last business owner cited, changed his:

…the attempted robbery and shooting changed the way he thought about guns.

It’s much harder to disarm people who have first hand knowledge that guns can be successfully and lawfully used to defend themselves and others. And this is exactly why Chicago’s civilian disarmament industrial complex fought against legal concealed carry as long and as hard as they did.

©2015 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.
Gun Watch

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50 COMMENTS

  1. This is literally the best. More of these stories please. TTAG is my source for 2A news and I use this stuff to fight the hearts and minds battle every day.

  2. (True) Knowledge changes us for the better. Guns can be good in the hands of us good folks. Enjoy.

  3. not recorded as a justified shooting. That’s because the FBI requires that a report of a felony accompany the report of a justified shooting.

    This is interesting. I did not know this.

    • What a juicy nugget this was! But, cmon the government who controls the statistic, under reports a facet that keeps them in unlimited power.

      Not surprised.

    • In part, it’s due to the officers involved lacking in due diligence. “Why write a report I don’t have to”?
      If they did a more complete job, they would write another report with the same case or reference number outlining the attempted robbery crime, checking the appropriate boxes to get ALL of the crimes entered into the UCR. Background on the bad guy. Was he a felon in possession?
      In short, the officers were lazy.

      • I’d amend that good sir to…

        If we report this, the people, if well-read enough, might not need as much of our public service.

        If crime was reported to be thwarted more by the citizen and not the armed serf, well, well, well, what do we need the serfs for?

        I mean, think about it, how many law enforcement agencies are there? We don’t need all of them now (the true republic, at the federal level wouldn’t need anything but the first two, the Postal inspectors and the Marshal service everything else should be divisions of said Marshal Service, maybe the Coast Guard LEO division, aybe), but more so, the stats would prove it.

      • Tom, this is encouraged by Chicago PD as part of their efforts to underreport all crime to make the place look less unsafe.

    • Dean and Danny,

      Mr. Guildersleve did commit a felony: ATTEMPTED robbery. This often gets overlooked.

      When asked those who successfully defend themselves with a gun often answer that they were NOT the victim of a crime. They often mistake a success in robbery, rape, murder, etc. as a prima facie element needed to perfect the offense. Likely they–and often their questioner too–are not unaware of the inchoate offense of an attempt. Another reason why criminal offenses averted, defused, or de-escalated go unrecognized and unreported: the victim who successfully defended themselves does not recognize themself as the victim of an offense. (One of the things I still remember that a good bar exam prep instructor told me: when it doesn’t add up or something looks missing, look for an attempt.)

      Here, what started as an attempted robbery stayed as an attempted robbery. Regrettable that the byproduct was Mr. Guildersleve’s death. But surprise deployment of potent counterforce from in front, a flank, or the rear is an occupational hazard of armed robbery. And the more who bear arms, the greater that hazard becomes.

      • “But surprise deployment of potent counterforce from in front, a flank, or the rear is an occupational hazard of armed robbery.”

        Interesting.

        Perhaps it should be recorded as ‘workplace violence’ then?

      • “Mr. Guildersleve did commit a felony: ATTEMPTED robbery. This often gets overlooked.”

        Mantra of the ‘modern’ law enforcement chief executive:

        “A ‘crime’ which goes undocumented is a ‘crime’ which does not go ‘unsolved’.”

        Similarly, an unsolved crime that is ‘down-rated’ from a Felony to a Misdemeanor appears better in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports.

        One such example from my own past:

        One night someone attempted to burglarize the storage garage next to mine, knowing that there was a vintage Corvette stored there.

        What they DIDN’T know was that the smaller personnel door they tried to gain access through was, in fact, welded shut.

        Upon learning that, they proceeded to crash their ‘getaway vehicle’ into MY door to disguise their attempt to break into my neighbor’s unit.

        Since I had an apartment in the rear of my unit, the crash awakened me; wherein I discovered my front door caved in.

        I called DPD to report the crime, and the patrol officer; a long-time friend of mine; arrived, we took a good, _long_ look at all the evidence, and he wrote the Incident Report up as an ‘Attempted Burglary of a Business.’

        Several days later, I received a call from a DPD Traffic Investigator doing a ‘follow-up’ on the initial Incident Report.

        When I questioned him as to why a Traffic Investigator was calling me about the crime, he stated that Traffic _always_ investigated a ‘Criminal Mischief with a Motor Vehicle’ incident.

        You see; in order for their UCR data to not show an ‘Unsolved Felony Offense’, DPD brass had ‘down-rated’ the Incident to reflect an ‘Unsolved Misdemeanor Offense.’

        Needless to say, I gave this Traffic Investigator a very large, very intense, very LOUD ‘piece of my mind’ about their blatantly fraudulent reporting tactics!

        That was over twenty years ago; so the ‘underreporting’ practice and policy is nothing new here —- but is still just as unethical as ever. 😐

    • I’m with you, I also didn’t know that was the case. I’ve learned my something new for the day, time to turn my brain off!

  5. From the WaPo:

    Nonetheless, the Chicago shooting is also raising questions, primarily from the family of the robbery suspect, Reginald Gildersleeve.

    “Something doesn’t seem right,” said Igbinosa Oronsaye, whose mother married Gildersleeve three years ago. “He didn’t deserve to get shot multiple times.”

    • …and he had everything to live for, and the killer stopped him from successfully turning his life around?

    • “He didn’t deserve to get shot multiple times.”

      Um, should the good guy with a gun have carried a hand cannon so he only needed to shoot once. Jeez. Just another family claiming their dead thug relative was a gentle giant and that there was some sort of conspiracy in play.

    • If he had obligingly keeled over dead after only one shot, then he wouldn’t have had to be shot several more times.

      • That’s about it. They have probably been taught all their lives through experience that they can do what they want and not face consequences. This guy had a long rap sheet with felonies including armed robbery and was walking the streets. What lessons do we think he learned?

        Well, he won’t be doing it again. And the stores that didn’t deserve to be robbed won’t have to worry about him anymore.

  6. The reason they hate coneared carry is that they are on the same side as the criminals. Do you think the liberal elite reaction to Ferguson would have been any different if the little Pakistani clerk pull out a Glock and shot poor little Michael in the face or that Obama would have been talking up the poor immigrant who looked like his son’s best friend if Katie Steinle used her LCP to end his shot at the American dream.?

  7. …and he had everything to live for, and the killer stopped him from successfully turning his life around?

  8. “When an aggressor is killed, though, the shooting is isn’t always recorded in the FBI uniform crime reports (UCR) as a justified shooting.”

    Isn’t this something Congress can take care of by instructing the FBI to include that data in the UCR?

    Tack it on as a rider to some bill Obama has to sign and get in into law…

  10. Anti-gunners (namely most Democrats) are more friendly to the criminal than the law abiding citizen. Why? Because criminals create unrest and force the public to rely on the government for protection and services. More government, more Democrats in power with more control than ever.

    • I’m the current age that is a precisely wrong answer. The Democratic Party isn’t pro independent criminal. That would be like being pro small business.They are allowed with the gangs. The gangs act as their security apparatus keeping the people in line. The alphabet LEO agencies are nuisance, not the threat. The Democrats are outsourcing social control to the gangs. You have to think of the gangs as the criminal equivalent of the crony capitalist.

  11. Ya’know I’ve been to Gage Park. What many don’t get is lots of shop owners(and regular folks) have been carrying for years in the big bad city. I know my buddy with an antique shop on 111th st. has a little revolver in his pocket. Yeah way before it was “legal” to have a handgun in Chicago-and his late best buddy was a retired cop. More high school shootings today sadly…they’ll just expand the gun free zoneout…

  12. Should we and the organizations that we are members of start to push for the FBI to keep record of justified homicides?

    • Not sure if it would be worth the effort. The number that is important is the number of defensive gun uses, not the number of justifiable homicides. The ratio of defensive guns uses (DGU) to justifiable homicides is roughly 1000 to 1.

      • Dean,

        As I have stated on other posts, here are reasonably estimates and the resulting math for estimating the annual number of legally justifiable defensive uses of firearms …

        Reasonable Annual Estimates:
        300 = justifiable homicides in FBI Uniform Crime Report
        1 in 20 (5%) = frequency that defenders actually shoot
        1 in 3 (33%) = frequency that defenders hit attackers when they shoot
        1 in 4 (25%) = frequency of gunshot wounds that are fatal
        ??? = legally justifiable defensive gun use (DGU)

        Calculation:
        DGU / (20 x 3 x 4) == justifiable homicides
        DGU == justifiable homicides x 20 x 3 x 4
        DGU == 300 x 20 x 3 x 4
        DGU == 72,000

        Therefore we expect that people use firearms in a legally justifiable manner to defend themselves from attackers at least 72,000 times annually.

        Important note:
        An unknown number of defenders have used legitimate, legally justified deadly force to defend themselves … and never come forward for various reasons. Without this information, law enforcement does NOT categorize the event as a justifiable homicide. Thus, the FBI’s annual listing of justifiable homicides is low. How low, we don’t know. If the actual number of legally justifiable homicides is twice as large as the annual FBI number, then the number of legally justifiable defensive gun uses would be twice my estimate, or 144,000 legal defensive gun uses annually.

        While my numbers are not exact, they are pretty darned good estimates based on real world data … especially the frequency that defenders hit attackers when they shoot, and the frequency of gunshot wounds that are fatal.

        • 72K or 144K seems low, although you are only counting incidents where shots are fired. From an old Department of Justice Report their figures are 20x to 30x higher for total DGUs (gun may not be fired). Are firearms drawn but not fired 20x to 30x as often? Maybe. Plus, the DoJ report was twenty years ago, back when, in the mid-90’s only, what, 1 or 1.5 million people had carry licenses. Now there are over 11 million, ten times as many. In seven states you don’t even need a license to CC. In 30 you don’t need one to OC. With ten times as many people licensed to carry, and with tens of millions of more firearms today than in the mid-90’s (actually about 150 million more), do you think the self-defense encounters are going down or up?

        • The FBI UCR only records about 10-20 % of justified homicides, so up the 144,000 DGUs accordingly. Gunshot wounds to criminals are fatal about 20 percent of the time (for those that go to the hospital), or 1 in 5. I suspect hits are lower than 1 in three. If we estimate one in five, and the FBI UCR underestimating by a factor of 7, we get 300X7X20X5X5 that comes to 1,005,000 defensive uses, or right in the middle of the survey results for defensive uses.

          The article on estimating the numbers of justified homicides gives some more detail. Milwaukee hospital records give the 20 % fatalities figures. How many misses is uncertain.

  13. Been carrying all day and nothing has made me unholster my weapon in self defense up to the time im writing this while im running my business.
    Nobody got hurt.
    Just don’t try to rob my shop or neighborhood.
    God bless.

  14. Hold on. I thought the criminal was supposed to take the gun away from the concealed carrier. That’s what they say always happens.

    • And the concealed carrier was supposed to “spray” the store with gunfire and hit innocent bystanders children and then he was supposed to get shot by police because cops are so easily confused when concealed carriers are involved in any type of DGU situation.

      • I can just imagine Shannon reading a story like that and bouncing in her office chair whilst clapping her hands and giggling most riotously…

  16. Something to remember- Chicago stats dont even make it into the FBI reporting- since Chicago wont format the data like everyone else. So, we know the FBI stats are down-biased by missing that information, especially the key metric- that something like – what- 70% of the crime is in the under 25 year old demo, and 90% of that is black on black-

    Can you say CHICAGO GANG WARFARE…

    but noooo….cant talk about that- might embarrass the ONE, might destroy the Narrative that the Reliable Party Organs have to double down on, as they have been the purveyors since day ONE.

  17. “…civilian disarmament types hate the idea of concealed carry permits…”

    How about that! It turns out the anti-self-defense types and I agree on something. The difference is, I’m against permits because you shouldn’t need a permit to exercise a right, but they’re against them because they don’t think you should have rights in the first place.

  18. At last we have the facts. This will make Sunday morning tv interesting when George Stepinopolice finally has to report that guns are effective in self defemse.
    Hardy Har Har Mat.

  20. “You’ve heard it often enough: Guns are bad. Guns cause crime. Guns are useless for self defense.” Guns are tools, just like shovels, power drills, spoons and forks.
    Funny how we never hear the argument that we should outlaw spoons and forks for causing obesity.
    And just like any tool, we certainly have to respect the possible dangers associated with using that tool improperly (pointing a power drill at something you don’t plan on drilling). Thanks, minor rant finished.

  21. “When an aggressor is killed, though, the shooting isn’t always recorded in the FBI uniform crime reports (UCR) as a ‘justified shooting’. That’s because the FBI requires that a report of a felony accompany the report of a justified shooting. There was no robbery in this case because the robbery was stopped. That’s one of the reasons why the FBI UCR severely under reports justified homicides.”
    — Dean Weingarten, 6 November, 2015
    http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/

    Each and every pro-gun advocate should save this ― and every time an anti-gun minion starts out saying that the FBI UCR doesn’t support the ‘justifiable use of deadly force’, use this quote against both their position and what appears to be an intentional act of misreporting¹ or underreporting² on the part of the DOJ’s “premier” law enforcement agency: the “Feral Band of (Child) Incinerators” (remember the ‘Waco/Mount Carmel Branch Davidian Church Siege, Assault & Kiddie Barbeque”?).

    ¹misreport
    mis·re·port (mĭs′rĭ-pôrt′)
    tr.v.
    To report mistakenly or falsely.
    n.
    An inaccurate or wrong report.
    –American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition

    ²underreport
    un·der·re·port
    tr.v.
    To report (income or crime statistics, for example) as being less than actually is the case.
    –Ibid.

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