"Just give them the money..."
Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2007 6:36 pm
In discussions of robberies and how to react to them, the argument "if all they want is money (or some other material object), just give it to them, it's not worth shooting someone over property..." comes up.
The rub is, from my point of view, that one cannot tell if all the robber wants is your money until a) he leaves, or b) he tries to kill/maim/rape/etc you.
One data point I have in mind is when an assistant DA of Bexar County showed our CHL class a video of a San Antonio convenience store robbery where the clerk obligingly raised his hands and was shot and killed for his trouble. He told us the number of robberies in SA for the previous year -- I don't recall the exact number, but it was a big one, and most robberies went unsolved.
Anyway, I ran across another data point that makes me skeptical that "just giving them the money" is a viable strategy:
Go to:
http://www.nbc5i.com/index.html
then you have to click on a link that starts "KFC Employee Fights for Life..." which will take you to a slide show of a security camera film. (It takes forever to load if you are on dial up like me.)
Key phrases that caught my eye...
- After hitting the employee over the head, the gunman got impatient.
(As the employee was trying to open the safe:)
- "You've got one more spin, then I'll shoot you, right now."
- With the gun pressed against the employee's head, the masked man pulled the trigger, police say.
You can go to the link to find out the rest of the story (and there twist to the story that I didn't include above...).
elb
The rub is, from my point of view, that one cannot tell if all the robber wants is your money until a) he leaves, or b) he tries to kill/maim/rape/etc you.
One data point I have in mind is when an assistant DA of Bexar County showed our CHL class a video of a San Antonio convenience store robbery where the clerk obligingly raised his hands and was shot and killed for his trouble. He told us the number of robberies in SA for the previous year -- I don't recall the exact number, but it was a big one, and most robberies went unsolved.
Anyway, I ran across another data point that makes me skeptical that "just giving them the money" is a viable strategy:
Go to:
http://www.nbc5i.com/index.html
then you have to click on a link that starts "KFC Employee Fights for Life..." which will take you to a slide show of a security camera film. (It takes forever to load if you are on dial up like me.)
Key phrases that caught my eye...
- After hitting the employee over the head, the gunman got impatient.
(As the employee was trying to open the safe:)
- "You've got one more spin, then I'll shoot you, right now."
- With the gun pressed against the employee's head, the masked man pulled the trigger, police say.
You can go to the link to find out the rest of the story (and there twist to the story that I didn't include above...).
elb