Sarasota pharmacist shoots robber

SARASOTA COUNTY - Pharmacist Frederick "Jerry" Pireaux shot a robber on Friday at his shop on Bee Ridge Road, the second time he has pulled his pistol and fired at someone trying to steal drugs.

"I never saw Jerry grab the gun," said Mike Hull, a friend who was behind the counter, chatting with Pireaux at about 4:30 p.m. "It happened just so fast. I just heard bang, bang."

The drug store, Bee Ridge Pharmacy, has two counters, one in front with the cash register. Pireaux, the owner, dispenses medicine from a second counter that sits on a raised platform at the back end of the store.

The robber was at the register, Hull said, and showed a clerk the gun, demanding oxycodone and yelling at her that she had 30 seconds.

The clerk turned and headed to the back of the store, her face "as white as a sheet," Hull said.

Then Hull and the clerk both ducked as Pireaux fired.

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20105081062

bet that guy won't try to rob another pharmacy again.

recommend.

That is just like saying pro-RKBA activist want to make sure drug store robbers have easy access to handguns.

If the pharmacist had not had the option to be armed, 911 (or simply hoping the robber didn't hurt anyone) would have been the only real options.

that handle a lot of cash have always been able to obtain CCWs for the most part. I don't think anyone is opposed to that. The major gun control laws that are now in question are ones to stop criminals from gaining access to handguns. Some of those, like NICS background checks on private sales, are supported by many of us gun owners. Yet some here lump reasonable guns law supporters with the "anti-RKBA activist". That is as crazy as calling pro-RKBA activist as supporting easy access to handguns for criminals. Neither sounds right to those in the middle. Sweeping generalizations weaken an argument.

and nobody, as far as I know, is trying to repeal it.

The gun control debate in 2010 isn't about repealing NICS; if you read the Brady Campaign's blog, their primary goals seem to be (1) new bans on nontraditional looking civilian firearms, regardless of how commonly owned and how rarely misused; (2) banning guns holding more than 10 rounds (5 for shotguns); (3) rolling back concealed carry licensure; and (4) revoking the gun ownership rights of anyone on the Bush/Cheney secret blacklists. If the gun-control lobby *really* wanted to extend NICS to private sales, they would have made that a priority a long time ago instead of spending all their time and money fighting rifle handgrips that stick out and post-1860's magazine capacities, and they might have come up with some proposals that didn't involve back-door registration.

As to allowing the wealthy to protect their money while denying the non-wealthy the ability to protect their lives, well, that's kind of a medieval arrangement that isn't all that consistent with a post-Enlightenment view of the human condition, IMO. The guy who works the counter nights at the 7-Eleven and walks home afterward is in a lot more danger than the guy who owns the business and deposits the receipts, and the single mother trying to raise her family in a low-rent apartment in the Bronx has more need for a gun than the guy who owns the apartment building and collects the rent checks. But yeah, even in Chicago where handguns are completely banned, politicians can still own them and get carry licenses, and Donald Trump and Charles Schumer have carry licenses in NYC but blue-collar workers need not apply.

Personally, I'd love to see elites and their bodyguards have to abide by every single gun restriction that the "little people" have to live under. It might be a little easier for an ordinary homeowner to lawfully own a handgun in Chicago if King Daley and his court couldn't exempt themselves from the restrictions.

The anti-gun "lobby" you speak of spends how much money compared to the NRA? A fraction at best. Gun laws have been and are getting more liberal all the time. The crazies on the gun rights side love to play the victim and talk about how all of their rights are being taken away. It ain't happening. I have 10 times more rights to carry and travel in this country with a concealed weapon than any other time in the last 60 some years that I have been alive. Yet the NRA would have you think that I'm under attack by Obama and congress while no restrictive laws have made it out of committee in years. But, you got to stir gun owners up with fear to get members and money.

The idiotic Feinstein law was not a figment of the NRA's fevered imagination; it passed. The truly scary Brady II bill (S.1878/H.R.3932, 1994) was not something that gun owners made up. And the party platform STILL calls for a ban on the most popular civilian rifles in the country.

In case your memory is failing you, S.1878/H.R.3932 (1994) would have banned all firearm magazines holding over 6 (yes, six) rounds; outlawed all pistols smaller than 6" x 4" (bye bye small Berettas and .22's); required you to pay $300 every 3 years and subject yourself to BATFE inspections of your home 3 times/yr in order to possess two bricks of .22LR ammunition; outlawed all hunting handguns over .45 caliber; outlawed the .50 BMG cartridge; outlawed all .22, .25, and .32 handguns weighing less than 18 ounces; and too much other bullshit to list. Banned 7-round magazines, small .22's, etc. already in private hands would have been placed under the same restrictions as machineguns and 105mm howitzers, e.g. the draconian Title 2/Class III restrictions of the National Firearms Act, as I read the law.

The only reason that we still have the right to own AR-15's, S&W 5906's, Glocks, and Beretta Tomcats in this country is the fact that the gun control lobby managed to harass lawful gun owners enough to get us off our asses after 1994, and since we outnumber the prohibitionists by a wide margin, we were able to roll back some of the restrictions they imposed (most notably allowing the Feinstein fraud to expire). And yes, the backlash against the Feinstein bullshit did allow gun owners to make some headway on carry licensure reform, which included overturning some Jim Crow era restrictions in my own state of NC, for which I'm glad. But I don't see NICS going anywhere, or the NFA, or the AP bullet ban of 1986, and to be honest I don't see any real support for doing so, although I wouldn't mind seeing the NFA registry that was closed in '86 reopened.

And you give entirely too much credit to the NRA; the real power of gun owners is the fact that there are 80+ million of us (most of whom are of voting age); we are somewhat more educated and connected than the national average; and we vote at higher rates than the national average, especially since the 1994 debacle. Thanks to that, the NRA could close its doors tomorrow and not much would change with regard to the political perils of enacting new gun bans. If nothing else, the Jim Zumbo incident a couple years ago should have told you that. As far as money goes, if you consider the dollar value of the in-kind airtime and print donations by the corporate media to the new-bans jihad in the '90s through 2006 or so, I think the NRA would have been outspent by a considerable margin. The gun-control lobby has been a lot smarter about exploiting the media and public health institutions, whereas the NRA is very much stuck in a late-20th-century top-down paradigm. In the end, though, that wasn't enough to overcome the sheer disadvantage of numbers.

BTW, in case you are under any mistaken impressions, my only affiliation with the NRA is as an on-again, off-again annual member, and most NRA-ILA materials I receive go straight into the shredder. I'm a technical writer in the aviation industry, not a lobbyist. But I got shoved mighty hard by the gun banners in 1994, finally got tired of the lies and bullshit going around related to the "assault weapon" fraud, and decided to stand up and speak out about it.

You seem to wish gun owners here had followed the example of British and Australian gun owners, who rolled over for every gun-control proposal that was introduced in their respective nations, regardless of how misguided. But in the end, that approach cost them almost everything. We here, at least, learned from their example.

From the article: "As he fled, the robber dropped his pistol. It was a Crossman Pro77 air gun." That is an air-soft gun.



Looks real enough to fool anybody at a quick glance.

For halloween, parties and cons. He uses a lot of air-soft guns for them. He makes sure never to walk around in public or take them into a store.

I made sure that my toy gun was an obvious toy. But the bullwhip was real.

he just would have bolted with his 'stuff'.

Nonetheless; not giving a shithead a chance to use a gun has plenty of merit.