Being a customer in a business being robbed is pretty scary. When you’re armed, it takes on an added dimension, though. A thousand questions likely run through your mind, including the possibility of what happens if you don’t draw and fire your weapon. It doesn’t mean you don’t act, necessarily, but it may well play a role in your head before acting.

One question you don’t have the luxury of getting answered first, even if you have time to think it, is whether the gun is a firearm or a BB gun.

In a Georgia Waffle House over the weekend, an armed citizen acted to stop an armed robbery. The suspect’s weapon was, well, suspect.

Now, it becomes easy for people to sit here after the fact and lament the fact that someone was shot for having a BB gun, but that’s not what happened.

This person was shot because he was trying to threaten and bully his way into the cash register of a business that earned that money. The fact that it was a BB gun and not a real firearm is irrelevant. No one knew that when the citizen acted, and no one can blame him for assuming that it was a real gun.

After all, the criminal in question banked on people believe it to be a real firearm. That was his purpose in taking it into the restaurant in the first place. He wanted people to think he was armed.

And they did.

The fact that someone believed him armed with an actual firearm and acted accordingly is the sole responsibility of the moronic jackwagon who tried to commit armed robbery with a BB gun.

I suspect there’s a line of thinking among some criminals that if you don’t have a real gun, bad things aren’t going to happen to you. Maybe they think that if you get caught, judges will go easier because it wasn’t a real gun. They figure the police won’t shoot you because it’s not a real gun (and recent history should show otherwise there).

If so, these crooks are even dumber than I thought.

When you have a split second to decide whether to act or let someone possibly die, you don’t have time to examine the weapon up close and personal. You don’t get time to look at the bore and determine if it’s designed to fire a small metal sphere or something a good bit larger. You might like to have that kind of time, but you don’t have it. You have to either act or deal with the repercussions of not acting.

Trust me. Not acting can have plenty of repercussions too.

In this case, the citizen acted. Correctly, in my opinion.

Georgia is a Stand Your Ground state and protects people who act to defend the life of another, and that’s what happened. The individual saw someone waving what looked like a gun in the face of the clerk, demanding money. There have been plenty of cases when armed robberies became murders, so he acted.

And a criminal learned that if you’re going to rob someone with a BB gun, bad things can happen.

A prime case of “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” if ever I saw one.

The Facebook post from the Villa Rica Police Department can be seen below.