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Back in the day, I relocated from Beantown to Hotlanta. Rolling into The City Too Busy To Hate was something of a culture shock. Especially when a gas station attendant strolled up to my RX-7 wearing a big ass Smith & Wesson revolver on his hip. Has anything changed? God I hope not. To wit: “The owner of Gerry’s Shell Food Mart on Willow Street [in New Haven, Connecticut] says he’s been targeted over 100 times in 30 years,” wtnh.com reports. “‘I tell the employee when they come in, just give them the money,” said Gerry Katz, the station’s owner. Katz says he’s had employees tied up and shot. There’s even a bullet hole from one of the incidents. ‘Every single employee has had at one point, a gun to the head,’ Katz said.” Wow. When are we crackers going to get a clue, take a cue from our friends south of the Mason Dixon line and tool-up? Seriously. When? [h/t to my eldest for the tune]

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56 COMMENTS

  1. You’re a cracker?

    Anyway, this gun-banning business can be traced back to Puritanism. See, creating that “city on a hill” required lots of social control. Once Christianity lost clout it’s child secular humanism stepped up. As a group the Yankees were and are into telling other people how to live. Hurrah for Puritan heritage! Telling people how to pray transitions nicely into banning certain idols (guns).

    Royalists, planters, and indentured White servants settled the South. Royalists brought traditional European values to the table. Planters brought the famous “get your ass off my property” attitude. White servants cherished freedom after their term was up. Mix it all together and you have a society that loves tradition, honor, and being left alone.

    These two sides fought a civil war in England and one in America. History really does repeat itself.

    • “Royalists brought traditional European values to the table”
      I thought a traditional European value was disarmament of the general populace?

    • Better actually check some facts on Puritans rather than spewing false blanket statements. Too quote Fesic “I do not think that word means what you think it means.” I am from that theological tradition. Their colonists were armed and so is most of my congregation.

      • Who claimed the Puritans didn’t have guns? I stated that the Puritan ethic is a drive more than merely a doctrine. Said drive picks up a moral fad and tries to force it on the rest of us. Temperance and gun control are prime examples.

      • I think his point was more that, once the religious drive was replaced with secularism–over a period of several generations–the behavior of telling people what to do, and how to do it, expanded beyond the original scope.

        Honestly, I find it hard to fault that logic; It applies to Judaism today (that’s what the whole “reform” movement seems to be about), and as Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, I fail to see how it would have some mystical immunity to the disease of secularism.

  2. With a cowardly attitude like that, is it any wonder he’s always robbed? And really, is he defective in the head to actually broadcast it like that?

    The further west you drive from the coast (just stop before California tunnel under Illinois), the better things seem to be, as I discovered when I left NJ for PA.

    • Do you think if he acted any different, it would change things? If I was a clerk making close to minimum wage, I sure as hell wouldnt give a damn about a couple hundred bucks of the companies money. And would give it to a robber regardless of what my boss said.

      • If Mr. Katz and his employees openly carried firearms, I bet his robbery rate would drop like a rock.

        To gun control advocates who see this remedy as worse than the problem, or exacerbating the situation, would YOU let a bad guy tie you up or hold a gun to your head?

        • Good point.

          Usually when you have a gun to your head, you dont have a choice if your going to be tied up. And unless you act like a cop and assume everyone is going to do you harm, and draw your sidearm whenever possible, there is a good chance you wont see it coming. I’m not trying to sound like an anti, but there are some companies out there that offer urban escape and evasion classes.

          On a side note, zip ties are not good for restraining people unless they’re specifically designed restraints. Even the large zip ties. Dont ask me how I know.

        • It is about the law, courts, and statutes in MA and CT. One good lawsuit by a shot thug or his surviving family could put the station out of business. Insurance Co’s would not cover him if he was going to shoot back…and that set of facts reinforces itself in a feedback loop. Boston, New York, and Chicago care about money, banks, investment companies, insurance companies and Big Medicine. They like their gangs and unions, at the low end of life. All three cities, like London, police their core financial districts with MUCH more intensely than the typical fringe area. Indeed my city, Philadelphia does the same. Murders in the city? Lots. Gun and knife crime in the core financial corridor of Philadelphia last year? NONE. The city publishes the maps by precinct and zip code.

      • The issue is that, once they have used violence and/or the threat thereof to extort money from the cashier, there is no guarantee that they will cease their violence once they have the contents of the cash register. Honestly, what’s stopping them from murdering the clerk at that point? What’s stopping them from beating him so severely that he becomes permanently disabled?

        Nothing.

        That’s why I like PA’s Act 10 of 2011 — it assumes that the clerk has reason to fear for his life, which makes his subsequent use of lethal force almost certainly legal, along with giving him civil immunity.

    • +1. Please note that Vermont is a very liberal state with our nation’s only Socialist senator, Bernie Sanders.

  4. Being someone who lives up north, we’ll only be able to carry guns when we get rid of the politicians and the police.

    “Katz says he’s had employees tied up and shot. There’s even a bullet hole from one of the incidents. “Every single employee has had at one point, a gun to the head,” Katz said.”

    And yet being a police officer is considered to be an especially dangerous line of work. Does Katz provide his employees with body armor or pay for their firearms and training? Do gas station attendants average $50k /yr nationally? Do they get pensions, and excellent medical coverage?

    • OK, I get it. You have a thing about cops. Well, that fits in well with the Q of the D: The anti-rights bit in New England really does radiate from Boston. I think Shays’ Rebellion conveys the early attitudes quite well. Many have concluded that the Revolution was desired for a decade by the mechanics, laborers, and sailors, but that it only happened when John Hancock and Sam Adams found the core trading profits of Boston threatened. As it evolves the money-center city elites simply don’t trust ordinary folks with guns, yes? They would prefer to have police willing to do their bidding. “They don’t need no stinkin’ militia.” When the police unions gained (Kennedy, 1963) the right to force mediation, unionize in the modern sense, their pay and power rose dramatically, not quite so much under the control of the city elites, but generally hand-in-glove with the city political machines. So it’s the machines, the city unions including police unions, the odd influential truly rich person, and on the other side? …..you! That’s not an unfair account. However outside the major machine cities, it is often less true. Less.

  5. My family owned and operated a fast food place for 25 years while I was growing up in Indiana. We never got broke into; we never got robbed. Part of the reason may be the fact that Dad, brothers and I would shoot clay pigeons with the shotguns and other targets with the rifles and pistols in the 5 acres of land we lived on which adjoined the place. We also had State Troopers and County Sheriff’s deputies who had keys to our place so that they could use the restroom and have a cup of coffee late at night. The State Troopers even assigned a Station number to the place so that the dispatcher knew exactly where they were.

    Otherwise an incident came close to mind the other day. When a semi-hood classmate of mine half-jokingly said something to me while I, at 15 was changing out the cash register tray. Right in front of one of the State Trooper frequent customers he mentioned that he could take all that money and keep his truck gassed up all year. The State Trooper looked straight at him and said “Only one problem with your theory Cletis. As the proprietor of this establishment, Mike can legally carry a concealed weapon on his person as well as the Remington 870 stowed beneath the counter. You probably wouldn’t make it to the door; he’s a pretty good shot” I had neither of those things but poor ole Cletis turned white as a ghost and never joked with me again.

    So not all Northerners have the attitude you insist we do. Most of us grew up in the country and learned to shoot, fish and hunt just like Bocephus.

  7. Forget all the serious gun stuff…. Who is responsible for that excellent version of Dixie Chicken? Gave me goosebumps. I love that old Little Feat stuff.

  8. It’s not a North / South thing at all; it’s more like an urban / rural thing.

    I grew up in NYC where few people had legal guns, and there were ten murders a week (murders in NYC peaked in 1990, when there were more than 6 per day).

    I spent 5 or 6 summers in rural, upstate New York where nobody spoke with a drawl, y’all, but everybody had guns and people died of old age.

    I figured out why long before John Lott.

    • “It’s not a North / South thing at all; it’s more like an urban / rural thing”.

      Good point. In California, people usually casually talk about the political differences between the northern and southern parts of the state. The far greater difference is between the liberal coastal area and conservative inland areas.

      • Aharon, you hit the nail on the head.The Central Valley is at odds with So Cal ,the Bay area and the coast. LEO ‘s are different.PORAC endorsed AB144 which made OC illegal in California. It started with San Bernardino ,Riverside and Bay area agencies ,they complained that valuable time and resources were being expended contacting folks in OC mode.

  9. It’s simple. Northerners are, for the most part, chicken-shit sheep that are so deeply conditioned to fear and loathe firearms by decades of liberal bullshit education that they can’t possibly begin to grasp the idea of “strapping up” and being self reliant. /rant

    • I certainly take issue with this. In my lovely suburban township just west of Philadelphia most families had guns when I was a kid, teenager: trap and skeet guns, WWII memorabilia, a handgun or two. It was normal for a stockbroker, lawyer, business owning family. That has all gone somewhat underground as PC asserts itself. Indeed as professionals increasingly became liberals, new groups moved into the township, and local mores shifted, votes shifted, too. Our police are well trained, but things aren’t what they used to be. Essentially we now have more people who never received an education shooting clays or enemy soldiers…and so are afraid of guns.

    • Well, to be fair, PA is NJ/NY on one end (Philly and to a much lesser extent Allentown), Ohio on the other (Pittsburgh), and Kentucky in the middle.

      The problem is that there are too damned many people in those big cities…

      • Not sure of where you’re thinking of. I live in Bucks Co. which is near NJ and while there has been a big influx of Jerseyites, it hasn’t changed the area into a clone of NJ culturally or politically. That may change in time, but it’s still much closer to the rest of PA than it is to New Jersey. And the areas of NEPA that border NY aren’t influenced by the attitudes of NYC. Philly is a basket case, so I’ll give you that.

  12. Trying, perhaps foolishly, yet again. Vermont is a very liberal state, with our only socialist senator, Bernie Sanders. It has arguably the most liberal (in the true meaning of the word) gun laws in the country. Granted, it is a small, mostly rural state.

    MA, CT, and NYC are the bastions of our economic elites. Country Club Republicans rule. Seriously, who is really trying to take our guns?

    2A is a class issue.

    • NCG, Sanders is an avowed socialist, yes, but isn’t he viewed as being more of a populist by the local folk?

  13. I live in New Hampshire and I love the “live free or die” state.

    we have the castle law, we are a FFL state, and we just got the right to make & sell weapons in state without having to put a serial number on it or report it to anyone.

    We have had our own state constitution and bill of rights since the 1600’s and a clear respect of what is granted by god and what is ruled by man so don’t mess with any yankee hillbillies unless you want trouble.

  14. It’s only within the past 50 years or so that things have changed so much (other than Chicago and NYC).

    Until my junior year, I went to Oak Park and River Forest High School; the same Oak Park (IL) that is one of the early handgun ban cities, and is now trying to get around the McDonald decision. Back then, I learned to shoot center fire handgun with the Optimist Club, at a 2nd floor shooting range not far from the school.

    My senior year was at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School (Maryland), where I earned my varsity letter in Riflery on the high school rifle team. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday I brought my Winchester 52-D to school, and locked it (in its large soft case) in my hall locker! No one batted an eyelash or said anything about carrying a heavy barrel match .22 to school, often ON THE SCHOOL BUS.

    We practiced at the range inside Montgomery Blair High School, and had matches all over the area including regional competition in the now defunct NRA range at 1600 Rhode Island Ave., in DC. I often took a city bus (the old DC Transit) to the (former) NRA building in DC, carrying my Winchester 52-D in its case. Never had a problem. Imagine if I did the same today!

    To say that I, my children, and grandchildren enjoy the freedoms of being Texan is an understatement! My PA, NY. NJ, and IL relatives think (know) that me and my family are crazy because we all have and use those nasty guns!

    • Evanston Township High School (northern Chicago burbs) still has a 22 rifle range in their basement, albeit it hasnt been used in decades.

  15. Minnesota has none of this northener crap goin for us our liberal governer is regularly seen carring and even using firearms in hunting season openers

  16. Even many urban Northerners are pro-gun rights and firearms owners-I certainly am and so are my son and daughter.
    I don’t like being confused with the West Side brunch crowd from Manhattan who read filth like The Nation and all too often exercise undue influence over our laws-prime examples-Kagan and Holder-need more be said?

  17. Matt seems to have a particular dislike for the police. He seems to work in a cop scenario in every post. Makes you wonder how many times he’s been arrested.

  18. Washington is North and things are great here, gun-wise. It’s mostly not a top of mind issue, but the laws are very friendly to those who want to take resposibility for protecting themselves and their families. We are open carry by default, shall issue for concealed carry with no training requirement, stand your ground, meaning no duty to retreat, and we have state preemption, so no local government can decide to interfere with any of this.

    All in all, a nice package. The only thing missing is we can’t carry in bars, but hopefully we can get that changed someday.

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