Message #23 (35 is last): Date: Thu Sep 23 14:20:25 1999 From: zonie@AZTEC.ASU.EDU (RICK DESTEPHENS) Subject: Feeding Frenzy To: AZRKBA@asu.edu
Last week I went to my local Tokyo Express for lunch. In the area surrounding (19th Ave and Camelback in Phoenix) are a gun store, a western wear shop that caters to the new genre of "cowboy action shooters" (couldn't they have come up with a better name, like "western action..."?), and an outdoor outfitter that caters to hikers, campers, mountain climbers and gun owners. And across the street we have a Phoenix police union.
As a result that restaurant is usually jammed with people packin' pistols plus postal persons with pepper spray. Most of the cops, plus the ocassional highway patroller, carry openly. The gun shop owners carry openly, patrons carry openly or concealed, and the plain-clothed cops carry both ways.
Last week I sat down to eat my sushi and looked up to see not just the usual half-dozen armed good-guys, but a total of one full dozen, or about a littleover one-third of the entire restaurant, including me. I don't think the store owner was carrying.
This struck me as probably the safest place (food-poisoning aside) to have lunch in most of Maricopa county. I got to wondering. Just what kind of crime rate does that particular strip mall have compared to other less armed venues?
We could do a case control study (yes, I am aware how sensitive they are to sample bias, just ask Dr. Arthur Kellerman) comparing the crime rate (during business hours) of a gun shop containgin strip mall versus one nearby, maybe across the street or so.
We could do it for every gun shop in the county. Even include pawn shops.
We would probably strike out asking for crime stats from the local authorities, but we could do a telephone poll asking very simple questions such as , "has your strip mall been the victim of an armed robbery..?"
What say you?
Rick