A Reddit user said the closest he came to shooting someone started on January 1, 2024, when he walked to a nearby Dollar General because his truck was out of commission and he wanted to pick up some drinks. He wrote that he was openly carrying that day because it was cold and because the pants he normally wore for IWB carry were dirty. According to his comment, the gun was secured in a Safariland ALS holster, and he was just standing there waiting to check out like any other customer.
Then an angry man stormed into the store and started arguing with the cashiers. The poster said the guy was furious over about $90 he believed the store had somehow stolen from him through the self-checkout. From the way he told it, the shouting went on for several minutes between the man, three female employees, and a woman the poster assumed was the man’s girlfriend. He made a point of saying that during all of this he had not said a word and had not inserted himself into the argument in any way. He simply backed away from the registers because he did not like the idea of an enraged stranger standing right next to his handgun, even with the ALS retention system on the holster.
According to the story, the whole thing escalated when the angry man finally noticed he was armed. The poster said the man looked over and blurted out, “Oh, they got a chopper. I got a chopper.” That was the moment the whole store changed for him. He wrote that as soon as the threat was out in the open, the man started speedwalking out of the store while one of the employees followed him. The girlfriend stayed inside shouting at the workers, but the commenter said that from that point on, his mind was only on one thing: whether the guy was going to the car to get a gun and come back in.
He said he immediately put his hand on his own gun, defeated the ALS retention lock, and got ready to draw fully if the man reentered the building. In his words, he had not yet drawn, but he had crossed the line in his head where he knew that if the guy came back inside with a weapon, he would have no real choice left. He then addressed the girlfriend directly for the first time and told her, “Tell him he comes back in here with a gun, he’s getting his ass shot.” According to the story, she looked at him blankly and answered, “Don’t do that. Don’t be Captain Save-a-Hoe.”
The man never came back inside. The poster said both the angry customer and the woman left, and employees had already called the police. He stayed in the store afterward in case officers needed a statement, but when they arrived they waved him off because Dollar General had cameras. He wrote that he genuinely believed for a few minutes that this was going to be the day he had to shoot someone, and he said he dreaded that possibility from the second the man made the threat. In the end, though, the man either bluffed, changed his mind, or decided $90 was not worth getting killed over. The commenter even said he hoped the guy had learned something from the whole encounter and did not repeat it somewhere else.
He also made clear that the reason the incident stayed with him was not because he got to play hero. Quite the opposite. He wrote that the last thing he wanted was to see that man get shot because he was too hotheaded to walk away. But once the threat was made and the guy headed toward the parking lot, the whole situation stopped being a customer-service meltdown and turned into a deadly-force problem he had to be ready for inside a store full of people.
So the story he told was this: he walked to Dollar General for drinks, stood in line while an angry customer screamed at employees over $90, and tried to stay out of it. Then the man noticed he was armed, announced that he had a “chopper,” and rushed out toward the parking lot. The commenter put his hand on his own gun, cleared the retention, warned the man’s girlfriend what would happen if he came back in armed, and waited to see whether he would have to finish the fight the guy had just started. The man never returned, police showed up afterward, and the whole thing ended without a shot being fired.
What do you think — if someone in a store suddenly threatened that he had a gun and rushed out to the parking lot, would you stay inside and prepare like he did, or get out with everyone else before the guy had a chance to come back?
Original Reddit post: What was a time you had to draw but not shoot?
