The National Supermarket Association, which represents roughly 600 independent grocers, estimated a quarter of its members in the [New York City] are packing heat, compared to 10% pre-pandemic.

“You see the necessity because the city is getting out of hand with the crime rate,” said one supermarket owner, who purchased a 9mm SIG Sauer handgun two months ago, after thieves cut a hole in the roof of his Ridgewood, Queens, store to steal $3,000 and smash up the registers and camera system.

“I feel safer having a . . . weapon with me,” the 50-year-old said, especially when going to the bank.

The gun-toting grocer said he hasn’t had to use his firearm, but practices once a week for the worst-case scenario where he needs to defend himself and his staff.

“I don’t know who is coming in, what I’ll confront, on my way in, on my way out,” he said.

Radhames Rodriguez, who owns several bodegas in the Bronx, said he purchased a 9mm Smith & Wesson pistol after obtaining his concealed-carry license two months ago.

“If I see somebody coming to me and I’m going to lose my life because somebody’s got a gun aimed at me, a knife, I need to protect myself and my family,” said Rodriguez, 60, who is also the UBA president.

— Matthew Sedeacca in NYC bodega owners, grocers arming themselves with guns amid violent thefts plaguing Big Apple

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

38 COMMENTS

  1. I understand that NYC is losing 2500 police officer positions in its new budge plan. And the local DA likes to prosecute gun owners. What a great combination.
    s/

    • They have been losing more than that to retirement/attrition since the pandemic started. No positions will be cut they will just wait until the exodus catches up with the number and claim the program worked.

      • The utopian libertarians, liberals and leftists are going to get their wish.There will be fewer police in the city.

        It’s really weird how they think. They believe crime goes down when there’s fewer police officers around. Just like they believe if you legalize all drugs, all the crime will go away.

        They are irrational and illogical people. They have a “luxury belief system”. And only they can afford to think that way.

        • Thise are not libertarian beliefs. You are the one fantasizing.

          Libertarians do beleive in eliminating anyone having a monopoly of force AND everyone having the means to defend themselves and the ability to do so. Disputes that do not require immediate violence to solve can be dealt with via a 3rd party selected and agreed by both parties to the dispute for this purpose.

          While reducing police is good, for it fit the libertarian paradigm it would have to come with a corresponding elimination of gun laws and elimination of prosecution of legitimate defense of persons and property.

          As far as drugs, if they were legal then they would be produced in factories with standard ingredients, and processes. The product would be sold in stores just like tobacco and alcohol. No one worries that their Jack Daniel’s or Marlboros are cut with fentanyl. I did not worry that my Metfotmin is either.

          Without the crime aspect fueling the prison industrial complex people would be able to hold jobs and pay for their habits. Drug prohibition has only increased drug crime, empowered criminals and the cartels, and lead to unknown products killing their consumers.

          We saw exactly the same thing with alcohol prohibition. It did not decrease consumption, it increased it, and empowered organized crime. Apparently you are not much of a history buff.

          It’s not just recreational drugs that libertarians want made legal, they want the entire schedule eliminated and all drugs to be available for cash without a prescription. Why I do I need a doctor to sign off every month on me getting my routine meds I have taken for years?

        • “No one worries that their Jack Daniel’s or Marlboros are cut with fentanyl“

          Only because Congress passed strict laws regulating the ingredients in food and drugs, after thousands of tragic deaths by unscrupulous producers.

          The rules and regulations that make up the purview of these agencies did not spring up like mushrooms overnight, there are a good solid reasons why we need this sort of regulation in our society.

          Perhaps you might be interested in reading Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’, it was a major force in the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

        • to Crimson pirate
          “Libertarians do beleive in eliminating anyone having a monopoly of force AND everyone having the means to defend themselves and the ability to do so.”

          I don’t know of a single libertarian who has said that in public. Not one of them was advocating for property owners killing to protect what they have. From being burned to the ground in 2020.

          “it would have to come with a corresponding elimination of gun laws and elimination of prosecution of legitimate defense of persons and property.”

          Send me a link where the libertarians party supports that. They supported the police stand down. While private property was burned to the ground in 2020.
          I don’t believe they support the law abiding taking the law into their own hands. They want me to wait for the law to show up.

          “The product would be sold in stores just like tobacco”
          Yes they wanted drugs treated like tobacco. Taxed so the government could raise more tax revenue. The drug leg@liz@tion crowd are parasites. They’re Soci@list pr0gressive in their p0litical 0rientati0n.

          And then they ran away from high tax California to low tax Colorado. They took their politics with them. And then F#cked up that once free state too.

          “Without the crime aspect fueling the prison industrial complex”

          ” people would be able to hold jobs and pay for their habits.”

          The libertarians are the one and only people who believe a drug user can hold down a job, to pay for their drug habit. And that is why I say you are an irrational and illogical people. Even the “working alcoholic” understands this. And so does their employer.

          “No one worries that their Jack Daniel’s or Marlboros are cut with fentanyl. I did not worry that my Metfotmin is either.”

          You are totally clueless. Libertarians supported government funded injection centers and the government doctors who run them.
          So the addicts don’t died from an overdose. Because of the poison they voluntarily put into their own bodies.

          “It’s not just recreational drugs that libertarians want made legal, they want the entire schedule eliminated and all drugs to be available for cash without a prescription.”

          Open air legal recreational drug use, has destroyed cities and states. It has caused the
          de-population of California, Colorado, and Oregon.

          “Drug prohibition has only increased drug crime, empowered criminals and the cartels, and lead to unknown products killing their consumers.”

          What would decrease crime would be to make it legal for the law abiding, to shoot dead on sight a drug addict, who rapes, murders, robs, steals, breaks into or vandalized private property.
          That would reduce crime. But libertarians don’t support law abiding people. They support drug addicts.

          You “took your mask off” when you supported prop 47 in california.

    • Got to get the money for those $300/$500 a night hotel rooms for the “undocumented” visitors to the Rotten Apple” from somewhere… Can’t take it from their free heroin and safe shoot-up zones or the mayors “operating” budget…

  2. When you honor your violent thugs and punish your peaceful citizens you have the situation NYC and San Francisco and loads of other Democrat ruined cities find themselves in. You need look no further than Detroit to see what Democrat control does to a place.

  6. In the last 8 years men attempted to rob me on two different occasions. Fortunately I was armed both times and both men decided that it was in their best interest to ABORT their attempted robbery. Those and other experiences reinforce the FACT that there are dangerous and violent human predators walking freely among us.

    My suggestion: I highly recommend that every responsible adult arm themselves for righteous self-defense.

    • I guess uncommon. Yesterday my family & I went to a local fast food place(Culvers). They went in to pick it up while I left my van running. A presumably homeless toothless older black man walked by & glared at me yelling something stupid. He proceeded to slap the hood of my van & yelled. I grabbed my gat which I ALWAYS have in the van. I yelled “no money for you!” He spouted profanity. I was prepared to shoot his dumbazz. My family existed the restaurant a minute later. And so it goes🙄

      • former water walker,

        Sorry to hear about your recent experience.

        It is next to impossible to gauge how truly dangerous someone like that is. Are they simply full of bluster hoping to intimidate you into giving them money? Or are they literally in a homicidal rage?

        I can say this much for certain: a person who is disheveled, who expects you to give them money, and who tries to intimidate you into compliance with an angry outburst–that all adds up to someone who is definitely NOT right in the head and by definition dangerous. The only question is just how far that disheveled person will go. Of course no one knows for certain.

        • No biggie uncommon! I lived in Chicago for 6 years. Took on lunatic’s completely unarmed. Bought another gat today. Wife completely onboard🙄🙂

  7. “The gun-toting grocer said he hasn’t had to use his firearm, but practices once a week for the worst-case scenario where he needs to defend himself and his staff.”

    Hey, TTAG – what’s the gun range situation in NYC these days, anyway?

    Last I heard, there were like a total of 3 in all 5 boroughs…

    • Maybe he got one of those laser-fire cell phone things, that’s all you need in NYC because if he actually ever shoots someone, he’ll find himself in a cell with “Bubba” on Rykers Island awaiting trial…

    • “Last I heard, there were like a total of 3 in all 5 boroughs…”

      Just checked, there are *4* in all of NYC, for 8 *million* residents.

      …and you just know they are gonna fight tooth-and-nail to permit any new ones.

      And so will Jersey. Crap, this will be an opportunity in Connecticut to build a few mega-ranges…

      • Don’t hold your breath waiting for Ct. While it’s better than NYC or NJ but really not much better.

  11. Good for them! Every person has a right to self-defense. Here in America, ‘We the People’ have that Right codified in the Second Amendment of our Bill of Rights ‘to Keep and Bear Arms’. The U.S. Supreme Court has already found that ALL U.S. citizens have the right to possess a firearm (with some exceptions) regardless of local laws restricting gun possession. This is where the NRA and other pro-gun rights groups need to step in and start filing class-action lawsuits against local jurisdictions that try to restrict that Right. NRA — put your money where your mouth is. Take legal action against these repressive regimes that won’t protect their citizens.

  12. Let’s get back to THE best answer: NYPD Stakeout Unit (Squad?) AND one of their CMFWICs, Jim Cirrilo (RIP), or the modern reincarnation. Back in the mid-70’s I had the great good fortune to spend time, and being trained by Jim at the the firing range he was in charge of, and was hidden away, in plain sight, in WTC South Tower.

  13. Well that’s just dumb. If he would let the robbers rob his cash he wouldn’t need to go to the bank.
    I tell you what with the price of food a human would come out ahead robbing a grocery store instead of a bank.
    I pushed the grocery cart out to Hyundai, turned to unlock the door and when I turned around someone had stolen my groceries.

  14. Stand your ground laws are a bad idea the statistics prove.

    This cohort study found that the staggered adoption of SYG laws in US states was associated with increases in homicide and firearm homicide rates across the US. These increases reach 10% and higher in several Southern states, while no states had significant reductions in violent deaths, as advocates often argue when justifying these laws. The accumulation of evidence established in this and other studies point to harmful outcomes associated with SYG laws. Despite this, SYG laws have now been enacted in most states, and the uptake of new SYG bills continues to be popular, unnecessarily risking lives.

    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2789154

  15. YOU ARE MUCH “LESS SAFE “FROM HOMICIDE OR SUICIDE IF A GUN IS IN THE HOME.

    You are 35 times more likely to die of suicide if a gun is in the home and you have almost a zero chance of survival if you do shoot yourself as compared to other forms of suicide. All this has been verified numerous times by the number of people saved by first responders that used another means other than a gun to try and kill themselves with.

    https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/06/handgun-ownership-associated-with-much-higher-suicide-risk.html

    Results:
    Of 595 448 cohort members who commenced residing with handgun owners, two thirds were women. A total of 737 012 cohort members died; 2293 died by homicide. Overall rates of homicide were more than twice as high among cohabitants of handgun owners than among cohabitants of nonowners (adjusted hazard ratio, 2.33 [95% CI, 1.78 to 3.05]). These elevated rates were driven largely by higher rates of homicide by firearm (adjusted hazard ratio, 2.83 [CI, 2.05 to 3.91]). Among homicides occurring at home, cohabitants of owners had sevenfold higher rates of being fatally shot by a spouse or intimate partner (adjusted hazard ratio, 7.16 [CI, 4.04 to 12.69]); 84% of these victims were female.

    Conclusion:
    Living with a handgun owner is associated with substantially elevated risk for dying by homicide. Women are disproportionately affected.

    https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M21-3762

  16. Summary
    Again, all of this is correlation, meaning that none of the studies directly prove that the policies in question actually caused the outcomes in question. Yet according to Dr. John J. Donohue, a professor of law at Stanford Law School and the National Bureau of Economic Research, it is possible to look at various studies and arrive at certain definite conclusions.

    “I think these papers all show that permissive laws around carrying of guns promote more gun violence than they stop and restrictions on assault weapons and high capacity magazines dampen mass shootings,” Donohue told Salon writing, citing his own extensive research into the subject. As one example of this, Donohue pointed out how Texas banned gun carrying from 1870 to 1995 before taking “a very sharp pro gun turn” in 1996. The results?

    “In 1995 Texas had about the same level of homicide as New York, and California had a 25 percent higher murder rate than Texas,” Donohue told Salon by email. “Today Texas has a 57.4 percent higher murder rate than New York and about an 18% higher murder rate than California. That is an astonishing turn around in 25 years compared to the two other large states. New York and California were restrictive on guns and benefited; Texas went the other way and has paid a price.”

    Donohue added, “Unfortunately, the Supreme Court will probably equalize things now since they want all states to be more like Texas (via aggrandized [Second Amendment] rulings).”

    https://law.stanford.edu/press/what-gun-control-studies-tell-us-about-how-to-stop-violence-according-to-experts/

    • I study studly.
      .
      Thank you for your Service.
      “You can keep your thank you’s , service is something a Bull does to a heifer.” – – actual statement from a retiree while being presented an award.
      Loved that old man, hunted quail with Parker shotguns until his legs just couldn’t walk no more.

    • lil ‘d, really reaching the bottom of the well with 39 year old “studies” arent you Tell me, did you watch it on VHS or Betamax? From here on out, why don’t you just start your irrelevant post with ” I just pulled this deep outta my ass….”

  18. We’ve been here before, and this sort of lawlessness is what brought the NYPD Stakeout Squad into existence in the 60’s.

    If you have never heard of this unit, search on the name “Jim Cirillo” and you’ll find books he wrote about his time and tactics on the Stakeout Squad.

    Well, today, the NYPD is rapidly shrinking, so store owners need to pick up the slack.

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