Armed Shopper Stops a Beating Inside a Georgia Dollar General: 4 Defense of Others Lessons

We had an interesting and what I think is a valuable example of a defensive gun use in George recently. Today we are going to talk about what happened and what we can learn from it.

This went down at a Georgia Dollar General on October 1.

What Happened Inside the Valdosta Dollar General

Just before 5 p.m. on Thursday, October 1, someone called 911 to report a man beating a woman inside the Dollar General in the 2100 block of Bemiss Road, according to the Valdosta Police Department. While officers were on the way, the caller updated dispatch. Someone had been shot.

Here’s what the police think happened. A woman was shopping with her teenage daughter when her boyfriend, a 32-year-old man, walked into the store and immediately started hitting her in the head. She went to the ground. He kept hitting her. When her teenage daughter tried to stop him, he hit the daughter too.

A 28-year-old man (I’ll call him the “gun owner”) shopping in the store saw and heard the attack. He drew his handgun and tried to stop it (presumably by giving commands and or making threats), and the woman was able to get away and run out of the store.

At this point, the gun owner tried to hold the attacker at gunpoint. The attacker charged him and started hitting him. The shopper fired one round, hitting him in the torso.

When officers arrived, they had a description of the shooter and found him standing in the parking lot. They detained him without incident. Inside, they found the attacker wounded and being held down by another person, and officers gave him first aid until paramedics arrived. The woman was treated at the hospital for injuries to her head and released.

The attacker was released from the hospital on October 9 and booked into the Lowndes County Jail on charges of terroristic threats (??), aggravated assault, simple battery, and simple assault. Police say the gun owner will not be charged.

Valdosta Police Chief Leslie Manahan didn’t hold back either. Manahan credited the gun owner with putting his own life at risk to stop a vicious beating, and said his quick action kept the woman from suffering even worse injuries.

Why This Defense of Others Case Is So Clean

Georgia’s use of force statute, O.C.G.A. 16-3-21, says you’re justified in threatening or using force when you reasonably believe it’s necessary to defend yourself or a third person against someone else’s imminent use of unlawful force. Deadly force is justified when you reasonably believe it’s necessary to prevent death or great bodily injury to yourself or a third person, or to prevent a forcible felony.

Georgia isn’t special. So far as I know, and I’ve made a study of it; anywhere in the great USA you have the same rights to defend other innocent people as you do yourself. All humans are equally defendable when facing an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury.

The biggest risk in any third-party scenario is getting the facts wrong. As a general matter the law protects you when you make reasonable decisions about what you see. If you see a man beating up a woman and her daughter without any real resistance it would be reasonable to assume he is the aggressor and she is a victim in danger of great bodily injury.

However, sometimes it might be less clear of the attacker is or what the threat is and both for the sake of being a good moral person who can sleep at night, and for the sake of the law, you better be pretty confident. Of course, good tactics are the decisions you make to remove ambiguity and train to get clarity on the situation.

But back to the Dollar General. This gun owner didn’t have to guess. He saw a man walk in and start beating a woman who wasn’t fighting back. He saw the man keep going after she was down. He saw him hit a teenager who tried to intervene. There’s no version of that sequence where the woman is the aggressor.

One more thing worth noting. The man and the woman were in a relationship, and the shopper almost certainly didn’t know that. It doesn’t change the legal picture, but it should change your expectations. Domestic situations are notoriously unpredictable for anyone who steps into them, which is one reason why a lot of cops tell me they treat them as some of the most dangerous calls they handle.

The Big Threat

Based on the data gathered by self-defense “insurance” companies, and our pure common sense, you are way more likely to be involved in a situation where you drew your gun but didn’t use it than you are to be involved in a shooting.

If you present that gun and give someone a command you are implying that a failure to comply with your command could result in you using the gun. That isn’t necessarily bad, but it is important to know because I’m familiar with far too many instances in which people are arrested for felony menacing or aggravated assault with a weapon because they flashed a gun.

Again, to be general, you can basically threaten to use a gun in the same circumstances in which you can use a gun. So if the situation unfolding in front of you isn’t clear enough yet to allow the gun to be used it probably isn’t clear enough yet to allow you to threaten to use the gun either. One of the most listened to episodes in the history of our podcast addresses this very topic: The Gray Area – When You Can Make Threats With A Gun

In this case however, the gun was absolutely appropriate to introduce and as it were it seems as though it was effective. Based on the report, once the gun came out, the woman got away. The beating stopped and she ran out the front door. Whatever happened next, the shopper accomplished the thing he stepped in to do without firing a shot.

That’s the point of the threat of force. The goal was never to shoot anybody. The goal was to stop a woman from being beaten on the floor of a store, and the draw did that.

Gun Doesn’t Equal Compliance

Once the woman was out the door, the gun owner presumably tried to hold the attacker at gunpoint. I wish I could say the data was on his side but it wasn’t really. We see a lot of different outcomes in this scenario and in this case the outcome wasn’t very positive.

And think about who he was holding. A man who walks into a store and starts beating a woman in front of witnesses is not a great bet for calm compliance. He charged. That’s not a surprise in hindsight, and it shouldn’t be a surprise in planning either.

We don’t know how far apart they were. We do know the attacker was able to close the distance and start hitting him. That’s the reactionary gap in action: the space you need between you and a threat so you have time to respond to what he does next. Inside that gap, he was faster than the gun owner’s decision.

So there is the first thing to consider. When you draw that gun you should really be prepared to use it because the big advantage that gun gives you disappears real fast when they close distance and put hands on you and/or your gun.

So what are the options?

• Create distance. Back up, put a shelf or a checkout counter between you, and give yourself time to see him coming.
• Let him leave. You are not a police officer. If he wants to run out the back, that’s a problem for the officers already on the way.
• Leave yourself. If the victim is out and safe, following her out the door is a perfectly good tactical choice.

None of those are guaranteed, and I’m not going to second-guess a guy who did the hard part right. But most of us practice the draw and almost never practice what happens after it. That’s a gap worth closing. Mental rehearsal and reading about things like this probably go a long way to helping you prepare.

One Round, Fired When It Was Needed

When the attacker charged and started hitting him, the shopper fired once. One round, one hit, and the fight was over in a manner of speaking.

That matters for two reasons. First, the timing. He didn’t shoot while the man was beating the woman, when a miss could have hit her or her daughter I imagine. He fired when the attack turned on him at contact distance.

Second, the count. This was a retail store in the late afternoon, with at least one other person inside. Every round you fire could have a lawyer attached to it, and a round that misses keeps going until something stops it. One shot, on target, keeps your legal exposure where it belongs: on the decision to shoot, not on where a stray round ended up.

The best way to summarize the best practice is would be to say, use the force necessary and keep using that force until such time the threat stops. I assume from this incident that after that first shot the bad guy stopped.

The Immediate Aftermath

Police showed up with a description of the shooter. They found him in the parking lot and detained him without incident. By October 12, they had publicly announced he wouldn’t be charged.

Before we got to that however I wanted to point out one other small detail from the news report. The police then went inside to find the bad guy and he was being “held down” by a few other people.

So this guy while temporarily stopped in his physical attack, was still a problem and some additional people took it upon themselves to prevent his escape physically. This is a guy who has been shot, so I would imagine the gun shot wound wasn’t particularly serious if people still had to hold him down.

So there is a lesson there. Don’t assume that the gun renders people safe.

And another lesson, preventing someone was escaping is a different type of action than stopping their attack of innocent people. One of those things can be done with a gun. The other cannot.

The Takeaway

Ultimately I praise the gun owner who did a noble thing and with the limited detail we have he appears to have acted admirably in this incident. I hope we can all learn from what happened and I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments below.