A friend of mine owns several convenience stores around the Jacksonville area.  Some are branded stores (Gate, Shell), while a few of them are not.  He inherited the non-branded stores from his father, and most of them are in areas of Jacksonville that most people would be afraid to go into, especially after dark.  He grew up working in his father's stores, so he got to know the people in the neighborhoods pretty well.  His dad was a guy who was always willing to lend a hand to people who faced hard times, and as a result, there was a lot of respect for him in the community, and the stores he owned were rarely targeted for robbery.

 

After my friend's dad died and he assumed ownership of these stores, he told me how the dynamic in the area, which was already pretty bad, had gotten significantly worse.  It got to the point where he was considering selling off those stores and focusing on the stores he had purchased himself. 

 

One day when he was doing some paperwork in the back of one of his stores, a kid came in and pointed a gun at his clerk and demanded all the money in the register.  My friend saw what was happening on the CCTV in his office.  He's a concealed carry guy.  He pulled his gun and came out of the office to see his clerk being pistol whipped by the robber.  My friend pointed the gun and let the guy know he was not afraid to shoot if he didn't drop the gun and stay where he was.  The guy turned on him and started to point the gun in his direction.  My friend delivered 3 shots before the kid could level the gun and take his shot.  The guy turned and ran out of the store, being hit twice in the chest and once in the arm.  He died in front of the store. 

 

When the police arrived, they determined the gun the robber was using was actually a pellet gun that resembled a revolver.  From where my friend was, there was no way to know for sure this was the case, and it was deemed to be a clean shoot.  A few days later, family members of the kid (turned out to be 15 years old and a kid from the neighborhood) started harassing my friend and making threats of retribution.  It didn't matter that their little darling had pulled a gun, or that he'd beaten someone with it.  All that mattered was he was shot and killed, and he wasn't a bad child. 

 

The harassment got to the point where my friend, who was actually really messed up because he had to take someone's life, finally had to just put the store up for sale.  He eventually found a buyer and moved on.  Sadly, what he did was fully justifiable, but that made no difference to the family of the kid he shot.  It haunts him to this day.  But, he still carries.  The one positive that came from the shooting is that word did spread in the neighborhoods where his other stores reside.  Robbery attempts at his stores dropped to almost zero. Every once in a while he'll get someone in the store who is clearly high on something trying to get cash, and he has instructed his clerks to just give them what's in the register.  It's not worth a life.  That was the mistake his clerk made.  He wouldn't open the register, and took a beating as a result.  Had he simply opened the register and given the kid the money, a lot of lives would have been very different. 

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