Case Study
Among the most likely targets were suburban gun stores, where at least some of these people expected to steal firearms and ammunition. One of those establishments is a gun and pawn in Washington State, owned by a friend of this columnist, Melissa Denny, a retailer and Second Amendment activist.
When several gun stores in her region were tipped off they might be targets for gun thieves, word spread quickly through the local firearms community. Denny told me in an exclusive interview the rioting in Seattle unnerved the region, and the threat of targeted burglary was very credible.
What happened at her store was a textbook example of neighbor-helping-neighbor.
One evening, she recalled, “A little black car showed up in the parking lot, waited for a bit and then peeled out. We thought that was kind of strange, so I called the police department and talked to the sergeant on duty and they put an extra officer on duty that night.”
She got off the phone, called the store manager, and 30 minutes later, another black car “came rolling through the lot really slow.”
“We thought, this isn’t good,” Denny recalled. “I called a friend of mine who said ‘You can’t stay there by yourself.’ He said ‘I think you’re being cased.’ I decided to stay there and as we were talking, a third car rolled through really slow. My friend called several of his friends and in about 30 minutes there were a half-dozen guys there. We were all outside talking when a fourth car rolled through.”
Cut to the chase; Denny and her friends decided to stay through the night, and it was an interesting several hours until daylight. There was an unusually large amount of traffic and a drone even flew over the area. People in some passing cars yelled at the crowd outside of Denny’s shop.
“This was not a normal situation,” she sagely observed. “There was an obvious interest in the store.”
Several gun stores in Denny’s region were apparently targeted. In the aftermath, she has improved the store security system, and at this writing, she had spent many nights at the store — with company, of course. On some nights early in the process, there were as many as dozens of friends and customers gathered in the parking lot.
As with Denny’s experience, the turnout of armed citizens protecting small businesses was not designed to create conflict, but to create a deterrent. It obviously worked.
“We are very clear we’re not law enforcement,” she explained. “We’re simply here to create a barrier. I’m there every night. There’s a (store employee) there 24 hours a day.”