Parents Complain Dead Thug Son Couldn’t Terrorize with Impunity

By David Codrea

USA – -(Ammoland.com)- “Why in the hell did this guy have a gun?” Temia Hairston, the mother of a restaurant invasion robber demanded to know about the Pizza Hut employee who shot her son in self-defense. Michael Grace Jr., intent on violently victimizing others, instead ended up with a bullet in his head, North Carolina’s CBS affiliates WBTV/WNCN reported.

“Hairston said she thinks the employee who shot her son needs to be in jail,” the report explains.

“If there was to be a death, it was not the place of the employee at Pizza Hut. That is the place of law enforcement,” she declared.

Except that’s not the place of law enforcement. First, they’re nowhere around when stuff like this goes down and they have no legal duty to protect anyway. And second, when they do react with force, the same crowd declaring police should be the “only ones” with guns demands they be defunded, and that rampaging lawbreakers (a.k.a. “political prisoners”) must experience no consequences.

“This wasn’t a body shot. This was a head shot,” Hairston continued. “My son was shot in the left side of his head just behind his ear. A head shot is personal.”

Doe she have a point? Is that not clear evidence of malicious intent and overkill?

She must not know how many shots “trained” police have been known to fire in lethal force responses – how many miss, and how many hit everything but the target. That a projectile fired by a pizza worker during a high-stress defensive gun use encounter struck an attacker so effectively is much more likely a matter of the breaks than of Tier One operator skill.

We’re told Grace was desperate, that he’s fallen on hard times. He (an by default his two fellow desperados) wouldn’t really have hurt anyone, he just wanted to provide for his child. And the “news” report does much to bolster that narrative. We see a slideshow featuring the dead perp wearing stars and stripes, smiling, wearing a tie, holding his son.

“Grace was just 29 years old,” the story laments. Who among us didn’t know invasion robberies were wrong at that tender age?

What the story doesn’t tell us – you need to access a different report to find out – is that Grace was armed and what with:

“Police said the robbery suspect was carrying a gun when he was shot.”

That’s quite the little factoid to leave out of the heartstring-tugging “report,” is it not?

It’s not like people working hard at entry-level jobs don’t know desperation themselves. It’s not like some of them don’t have children. And it’s not like we don’t have example after example of remorseless predators slaughtering the hard-working poor because they’re too evil and lazy to do things the right way. Ask the Wendy’s massacre survivor if he thinks it’s safe to assume compliance ensures safety.

Temia doesn’t think Mikey Jr. would have hurt anyone?  Would she have thought he’d rob a Pizza Hut at gunpoint if you’d asked her beforehand?

“Just give them what they want” is a deceptive mantra promoted by those who would rather see good people dead than armed, as if it’s about a few dollars in the cash register as opposed to some dirt bag thug, unfit to live among decent people, threatening to kill you. What if “what they want” is everything you and yours have, including your lives?

It’s not like this is the first time we’ve seen relatives of serial degenerates blaming the victims.

The family of a suspected thief is lashing out after their son was shot during an armed robbery. Relatives of Adric White, 18, believe the Good Samaritan who opened fire should have “just left the store.”

There’s an excuse for everything:

“You have to look at it from every child’s point of view that was raised in the hood. You have to understand… how he gonna get his money to have clothes to go to school? You have to look at it from his point-of-view.”

We could find more examples, but the point is made.

We can still find a degree of common human sympathy for Grace’s parents and resist the urge to blame them for his adult decisions. They lost their child, someone they raised and no doubt loved. We can feel sorry for his kid. They‘re all  hurting. That’s sad.

That said, here comes the “but.”

The “progressive” entitlement mentality—that some can victimize others with impunity, and that if a victim resists and prevails the fault is his – is as offensively delusional as it is un-American. Couple that with the “progressive” demand for citizen disarmament and it’s evil, dangerous and intolerable.

The parents’ loss doesn’t change that. By acting like it does, any sympathy rational people have for them quickly — and deservedly — turns into something else.

About David Codrea:

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating / defending the RKBA and a long-time gun rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament.

In addition to being a field editor/columnist at GUNS Magazine and associate editor for Oath Keepers, he blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.