Samuel Smith was hanging out about 9:00 last night, sitting on his friend’s stoop in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania when two suspicious passers by . . . passed by. Spidey senses a-tingling, Sam decided it was time to, you know, load his gun. “As the two men walked by, Smith had an uneasy feeling and loaded a magazine into his gun and reholstered the weapon.” Sam must be living right because he got what most crime victims don’t – a little advance warning. Give him props for situational awareness, though. But he may want to consider running out and buying a lottery ticket soon because despite an even bigger mistake he was about to make than walking around with an empty gun, fortune seems to be smiling on him these days . . .
The two shady dudes soon circled back and asked to bum cigarette. But it quickly became apparent that they had no interest in a smoke when one of them pressed a gun against his belly.
“He said, ‘Give me your (expletive) in your pockets,’ and shoved a gun in my stomach,” Smith said. “I took both my hands, one went on my wallet and the other I reached behind and put on my gun.”
Smith, a security guard who has a concealed weapons permit to carry a firearm, said the black male swatted his hand away from his wallet. When he did, Smith extended his other hand grasping his gun and fired a round in the ground.
“They ran away, the black kid ran toward Little Flower Manor, and the white kid ran the other way stripping off his clothes,” Smith said.
If the account of what went down is accurate – always an iffy proposition – it’s hard to reconcile the thought process that led Sam to fire a warning shot at the ground rather than putting one into the guy who had a pistol pointed at some of his vital organs. Nevertheless, we couldn’t be happier that – despite all odds and logic – the whole hot mess somehow worked out with no loss of bodily fluids.
Oh and Sam, next time a newspaper photographer asks you to hold your gun like that for a picture, tell him where he can stick it.