Interview with CA shopowner who killed five gang members in three attacks.
The man tells his story on this video. Takes ten minutes. WARNING: Video has a picture of dead gang member on floor.
http://gunssavelives.net/self-defense/ca-businessman-kills-five-gang-members-in-multiple-attacks/
For those who don't want to spend ten minutes, I will summarize.
Lance Thomas had a watch repair shop and sold expensive watches. Other, similar stores in area were robbed and their owners were murdered in the robberies. Thomas decided to buy a gun.
First incident: Within weeks of getting the gun, two armed robbers came in, assaulted a customer, drew their guns and demanded all the watches. Thomas had a revolver handy and shot it out with the robbers. One robber was hit, later arrested and convicted. Other robber fled.
Second incident: Thomas bought guns and hid them one every three feet in the shop. He began to practice a lot at a range and plan what to do in different scenarios. Three and a half months later two armed robbers entered his shop, two others stand lookout outside. Gunfight. Many shots. He called 911 while the gunfight was happening. You can hear the shots on the tape. Thomas killed both robbers but was hit four times. He recovered fully.
Third incident: Improves store security, buys better guns, practices more with guns. Two years pass. Single armed robber enters. Shootout. Robber killed, Thomas takes minor wound.
Fourth incident: (Time frame not given) Improves store security some more. Two gang members come in to kill him for revenge. Thomas killed them both. Thomas was not injured. He was quickly told that the gang involved wanted revenge. He shut down the shop and now works by appointment only.
All subjects had extensive criminal records.
My thoughts: He should have had bullet proof glass installed and did all dealing through the glass, like some banks do. I would have done that after one of the other shopkeepers was murdered. Wear Kevlar vest when going from car to shop & back. Yes, wear gun too.
= new reply since forum marked as read
otherwise known as Getting The Hell Outta Dodge !! 
I would have left after the second incident.
Shot four times and survived?
Yeah, that would be a sign from the Man in the Sky for me.
Unfortunately, not supremely excellent enough to penetrate your sassenach sensibility. 
or not appropriate precautions were taken to weed out false responses: (emphasis added)
1. Methods
The present survey is the first survey ever devoted to the subject of armed self-defense. It was carefully designed to correct all of the known correctable or avoidable flaws of previous surveys which critics have identified. We use the most anonymous possible national survey format, the anonymous random digit dialed telephone survey. We did not know the identities of those who were interviewed, and made this fact clear to the Rs. We interviewed a large nationally representative sample covering all adults, age eighteen and over, in the lower forty-eight states and living in households with telephones. [42] We asked DGU questions of all Rs in our sample, asking them separately about both their own DGU experiences and those of other members of their households. We used both a five year recall period and a one year recall period. We inquired about uses of both handguns and other types of guns, and excluded occupational uses of guns and uses against animals. Finally, we asked a long series of detailed questions designed to establish exactly what Rs did with their guns; for example, if they had confronted other humans, and how had each DGU connected to a specific crime or crimes.
We consulted with North America's most experienced experts on gun-related surveys, David Bordua, James Wright, and Gary Mauser, along with survey expert Seymour Sudman, in order to craft a state-of-the-art survey instrument designed specifically to establish the frequency and nature of DGUs. [43] A professional telephone polling firm, [Page 161] Research Network of Tallahassee, Florida, carried out the sampling and interviewing. Only the firm's most experienced interviewers, who are listed in the acknowledgements, were used on the project. Interviews were monitored at random by survey supervisors. All interviews in which an alleged DGU was reported by the R were validated by supervisors with call-backs, along with a 20% random sample of all other interviews. Of all eligible residential telephone numbers called where a person rather than an answering machine answered, 61% resulted in a completed interview. Interviewing was carried out from February through April of 1993.
The quality of sampling procedures was well above the level common in national surveys. Our sample was not only large and nationally representative, but it was also stratified by state. That is, forty-eight independent samples of residential telephone numbers were drawn, one from each of the lower forty- eight states, providing forty-eight independent, albeit often small, state samples. Given the nature of randomly generated samples of telephone numbers, there was no clustering of cases or multistage sampling as there is in the NCVS; [44] consequently, there was no inflation of sampling error due to such procedures. To gain a larger raw number of sample DGU cases, we oversampled in the south and west regions, where previous surveys have indicated gun ownership is higher. [45] We also oversampled within contacted households for males, who are more likely to own guns and to be victims of crimes in which victims might use guns defensively. [46] Data were later weighted to adjust for oversampling.
Each interview began with a few general "throat-clearing" questions about problems facing the R's community and crime. The interviewers then asked the following question: "Within the past five years, have you yourself or another member of your household used a gun, even if it was not fired, for self-protection or for the protection of property at home, work, or elsewhere? Please do not include military service, police work, or work as a security guard." Rs who answered "yes" were then asked: "Was this to protect against an animal or a person?" Rs who reported a DGU against a person were asked: "How many incidents involving defensive uses of guns against persons happened to members of your household in the past five years?" and "Did this incident [any of these incidents] happen in the past twelve [Page 162] months?" At this point, Rs were asked "Was it you who used a gun defensively, or did someone else in your household do this?"
All Rs reporting a DGU were asked a long, detailed series of questions establishing exactly what happened in the DGU incident. Rs who reported having experienced more than one DGU in the previous five years were asked about their most recent experience. When the original R was the one who had used a gun defensively, as was usually the case, interviewers obtained his or her firsthand account of the event. When the original R indicated that some other member of the household was the one who had the experience, interviewers made every effort to speak directly to the involved person, either speaking to that person immediately or obtaining times and dates to call back. Up to three call- backs were made to contact the DGU-involved person. We anticipated that it would sometimes prove impossible to make contact with these persons, so interviewers were instructed to always obtain a proxy account of the DGU from the original R, on the assumption that a proxy account would be better than none at all. It was rarely necessary to rely on these proxy accounts-- only six sample cases of DGUs were reported through proxies, out of a total of 222 sample cases.
While all Rs reporting a DGU were given the full interview, only a one-third random sample of Rs not reporting a DGU were interviewed. The rest were simply thanked for their help. This procedure helped keep interviewing costs down. In the end, there were 222 completed interviews with Rs reporting DGUs, another 1,610 Rs not reporting a DGU but going through the full interview by answering questions other than those pertaining to details of the DGUs. There were a total of 1,832 cases with the full interview. An additional 3,145 Rs answered only enough questions to establish that no one in their household had experienced a DGU against a human in the previous five years (unweighted totals). These procedures effectively undersampled for non-DGU Rs or, equivalently, oversampled for DGU-involved Rs. Data were also weighted to account for this oversampling.
Questions about the details of DGU incidents permitted us to establish whether a given DGU met all of the following qualifications for an incident to be treated as a genuine DGU: (1) the incident involved defensive action against a human rather than an animal, but not in connection with police, military, or security guard duties; (2) the incident involved actual contact with a person, rather than merely investigating suspicious circumstances, etc.; (3) the defender could state a specific crime which he thought was being committed at the time of the incident; (4) the gun was actually used in some way--at a minimum it had to be used as part of a threat against a person, either by [Page 163] verbally referring to the gun (e.g., "get away--I've got a gun" or by pointing it at an adversary. We made no effort to assess either the lawfulness or morality of the Rs' defensive actions.
An additional step was taken to minimize the possibility of DGU frequency being overstated. The senior author went through interview sheets on every one of the interviews in which a DGU was reported, looking for any indication that the incident might not be genuine. A case would be coded as questionable if even just one of four problems appeared: (1) it was not clear whether the R actually confronted any adversary he saw; (2) the R was a police officer, member of the military or a security guard, and thus might have been reporting, despite instructions, an incident which occurred as part of his occupational duties; (3) the interviewer did not properly record exactly what the R had done with the gun, so it was possible that he had not used it in any meaningful way; or (4) the R did not state or the interviewer did not record a specific crime that the R thought was being committed against him at the time of the incident. There were a total of twenty-six cases where at least one of these problematic indications was present. It should be emphasized that we do not know that these cases were not genuine DGUs; we only mean to indicate that we do not have as high a degree of confidence on the matter as with the rest of the cases designated as DGUs. Estimates using all of the DGU cases are labelled herein as "A" estimates, while the more conservative estimates based only on cases devoid of any problematic indications are labelled "B" estimates.
Here is the disclosure that appears at the beginning of Kleck's book "Targeting Guns" - clearly presented as a pre-emptive defense against smearmasters such as yourself who falsely insinuate that he's "on the take" from the NRA:
The author is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Independent Action, Democrats 2000, and Common Cause, among other politically liberal organizations. He is a lifelong registered Democrat, as well as a contributor to liberal Democratic candidates. He is not now, nor has he ever been, a member of, or contributor to, the National Rifle Association, Handgun Control, Inc. nor any other advocacy organization, nor has he received funding for research from any such organization.
Caller: Hello! I'd like to ask you some very personal questions about guns and your use of them against others. I assure you, I don't know who you are. So your privacy and anonymity are secure.
Interviewee: How did you get my number?
Caller: Oh, it was randomly selected by a computer.
Interviewee: Oh, that makes me feel much better. Come on over for a nice cup of tea then. Oh, and while you're here you can have my firstborn.
I guess if you buy that crap, you probably should carry a gun around. You guys really crack me up! 
Which is why the case for gun restriction is failing & flailing on all fronts.
Actually, it just made me laugh again...
I think carry permits should include skin thickness tests.
I thought it was a pretty funny comment. I don't usually agree with you, but you do have a good sense of humor and we need that here every now and then to break up the animosity.
Keep it up. 
Gotta keep the troops entertained. If we agreed all the time, it would be so boring. 
Don't you realize that for the Delicate Flowers, gun ownership is for three reasons.
1) to get up enough nerve to venture outside the house to buy groceries
2) to realize their Rambo fantasies
3) to overthrow the "evil libruls" in the gov't
You violated #2, and for that you got a lot of flack.
...and some types of businesses attract more crime than others ("Why do you rob banks?" "Because that's where the money is."
...on what you mean in this context when you write: "The gangs will want revenge. Cops should take advantage of that." 
at a Holiday Inn recently, but it seems pretty obvious to me that when police have reason to believe that a particular person or facility is a likely target of a crime, increased surveillance, patrols, and even sting-type operations can be very effective ways to catch criminals...
I'm sure this problem will get better though. 
> He shut down the shop and now works by appointment only.
What a sellout. He should've gone Full Rambo: set up a bunch of machine-gun nests, bunkers, etc, and duked it out. How can he stop when he did? The (vicarious) self-esteem of the Delicate Flowers demands Full Rambo!
How dare he try and outsmart his enemies, he should have hunted them down in the streets!
Fucking unreal. 
In this case, that appears to be applicable as this guy had to get shot four times before he realized that maybe a different business model was in order.
Says you...
I don't fixate obsessively as part of some half-baked Half-Rambo scheme to somehow slaughter all the bad guys in the world "if given the chance" like so many of the Gunnerhood.
