I've seen so many heavily reviled non-stories lately that I just had to share my own from this morning. I'm in kind of a bizarre mood today, so I present to you:"How u/357Magnum didn't do anything and nothing happened"I woke up this morning in my old Death Wish T-shirt that I got in college, 12ish years ago, back when I was a dipshit who thought wearing a T-shirt advertising a vigilante movie from 1974 somehow made me "different" enough to look "cool." Coincidentally, this is the shirt I was wearing on the very first day I ever carried a concealed handgun. Fortunately, I have the presence of mind now to realize this is the worst fucking shirt you want to have on while packing heat. Now I don't wear anything gun related, and if anything usually look about as masculine as a pair of pink pants makes a man.So I woke up wearing said shirt having worn it to bed as a "I'm not leaving the house looking like this" outfit. Except my wife NEEDED something from CVS. "Can you just put on shoes and run to the store real quick?" She said.Now, I'm not one to ever not do exactly what my wife asks. As I said, I've developed a lot of wisdom in my life. But the first thing I thought was "man do I really need to put on my gun right now?" The answer is "of course you do, you are a regular contributor to r/CCW." I could hear the chorus of critical voices in my head at the mere consideration of leaving the house without my trusty piece. ESPECIALLY on a very short errand. As we all know, the shorter an errand, the more likely you are to encounter an unprovoked, violent attack.So I took the time to put on real pants and belt on my Shield. I get to the store, get my item, and go to check out. Of course, there are no employees anywhere near the register. What is in the front of the store, deliberately near the lack of CVS personnel, is a shoplifter. The absolutely least subtle and refined of the sort I've ever encountered. When I appeared in the front of the store he gave a visible start, and quit fooling with the plastic bag that I think he was trying to see if the waistband of his basketball shorts could support and conceal. He "surreptitiously" looked at me about 30 times a second and tried to act natural, though what came naturally was "looking like I'm trying to steal literally everything."So here I am waiting at the register waiting for someone to arrive. Now, at no point here am I thinking like my Charles Bronson shirt would want me to think. In fact, the first thing I thought was "hey cool, a situation I'm almost certainly not going to get involved in!" As I've already mentioned, I'm in a shitty mood and I just want to get my stuff and go home. The guy didn't look armed - he fiddled with his waistband too much for it to have been holding anything. Still, I'm not one to make assumptions like that, so I decided to keep an eye on him.But being the responsible citizen I am, I decide that I am going to at least tell the staff at the store that this dude is obviously stealing and that they might want to call police. Fortunately, the staff finally shows up. The two present employees, a lady and a guy, had been doing something with some kind of boxes in the makeup aisle. The lady approaches me at the register. The guy immediately notices the world's most suspicious customer, who is now in the liquor aisle (having "stealthily" peered at me standing at the register about another 60 times in the interim).The guy employee asks if the thief "needs any help," but this is just a pretense for "immediately seeing him trying to put a liquor bottle in his pants." Some words are exchanged that I can't hear, and the next thing I see is the thief leaving while murmurshouting a litany of "fuck yous."By this time the lady employee has reached the register and I start checking out. Guy employee approaches and I ask if everything is ok. He says that the guy was trying to put a liquor bottle in his plastic bag. I said that I had seen him fiddling with said bag and trying to put something in his shorts and I was going to tell them about it. The guy employee makes a comment to the lady employee about "and tons of stuff like this" leading me to believe that the lady is new or just some kind of regional manager or something and that they were just talking about how things go down at this store.I get my item and leave. The thief was long gone. I go home just fine and nothing happens. There would be no headline reading "Charles Bronson wannabe draws gun on mentally disabled man for fiddling with his pants in public."See, I told you the story was shitty.So I guess this is the point where we go over "lessons."Yes yes, we all know that "things can happen" even on the quickest of errands to an otherwise empty CVS at 8:00 am on Thursday. Except nothing dangerous happened and I never considered drawing my gun. That being said, it was, as always, nice to know that I did have my gun. I guess if I hadn't brought it on this one errand and encountered the same thing, I would have felt much more like fate was conspiring to fuck me for no reason.This is literally the closest I've been to "a crime" in the decade that I've been carrying, and I was immediately aware of it. So I guess my situational awareness skills are pretty ok, or I guess the world isn't nearly as dangerous as way too many of us fantasize about.I learned, I guess, how comfortably far I am from doing anything stupid with my gun. Shit, I didn't even feel nervous at all. I was just a person seeing a thing that was not a dangerous thing, but that if it became a dangerous thing I at least had a plan. And the plan was mostly "leave, as the guy was not between me and the exit." Only if the guy had immediately and savagely tried to murder guy employee would I have done a thing. Probably.If I'm going to take the time to put on real pants and a gun, I should take the time to change out of my Death Wish shirt, or just go back to never wearing it like I've done for the last half-decade. via /r/CCW https://ift.tt/2v3gpJq
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