A Pizza Hut deliverer fired shots at an armed robber who threatened his life, wounding him and leading to the criminal’s capture by police. What kind of reward did James Spiers get for his self-defense? Unemployment:
Vonnie Walbert, vice president of human resources at Pizza Hut’s corporate offices in Dallas, said last week that employees are not allowed to carry guns “because we believe that that is the safest for everybody.” --- Pizza Hut has every right to set its employment conditions.
Regardless of the outcome, what the man did was to endanger every other delivery driver. When I owned (and ran) bars, I stressed to every bartender that, if confronted with a gun, to do exactly what the holder of said gun wanted, up to and including carrying the cash register to the car for them. In the Pizza Hut case, the driver is very fortunate that the robber didn't take his gun away from him and use it on him. The bad guy then gets a gun to sell along with the petty amount of money he got. The driver gets a nice funeral.
Pizza Hut's policy is by far the smarter and safer policy.
(I thought you right-wing guys were for companies setting their own rules of employment. )
Posts: 16163 | Location: Lincoln Place, Granite City, IL, USA | Registered: 06-03-02
Who on earth would think it a smart idea to phone for then rob a pizza-delivery guy at gunpoint? How much cash could such a person conceivably be carrying? $100? $200?
Edit - apparently it's $20.
'Howe's co-worker Kimberly Babis said Spiers should not have been armed on the job, no matter what the safety concern. She said most drivers have the right to refuse a delivery if they feel it could pose danger.
"I don't understand why the pizza delivery guy had a gun," she said. "And even if the other guy was trying to rob him, it's a measly 20 bucks. At least that's how much our drivers have on them."'www.desmoinesregister.com
"Have I got this right? There is a constitutional right to bear arms, including firearms, unless the employer says it's against company policy?"
Not quite. Most states limit, in one way or another, exactly how and when a person can exercise his constitutional right. Most states do not allow concealed weapons to be legally carried without a permit to do so. Shotguns under a certain length are also generally illegal, as are many other types of firearms. However, constitutional rights do not always supersede a company's rules. Some examples:
Generally speaking, teachers may not carry guns at a school, even if they have a concealed carry permit.
It is illegal in many states to carry a weapon into a church. Other states allow it if a special permit has been issued.
Despite the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of assembly, employees may not gather around the water cooler and talk all day.
Despite the Fourth Amendment's guarantee regarding the rights of the people to have their papers secure from unreasonable search and seizure, a company may, generally speaking, go through an employees desk, looking at any papers it finds. The same is usually true for his briefcase.
The First Amendment right to freedom of speech has been generally construed to also mean freedom of expression in one's attire. However, that does not mean you can approach the bench sans shirt.
While the First Amendment does protect one's freedom of speech, it is still illegal in most (if not all) states to incite a riot, or, for that matter, yell "Fire" in a crowded place, such as a theater.
An expression here (and possibly in the UK) in the legal profession is "For every right, there is a remedy." Another factor, possibly the most germane, is that the entire Bill of Rights protects the people from the government, not from each other. In either case, the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments are ignored fairly often, and always have been.
See below for the text of the Bill of Rights. (An aside - Note that the 3rd Amendment is essentially meaningless.)
I guess we may never get the full story, but I'm wondering how this played out, exactly. The delivery guy says there was a gun to his head and 'no other way out'.
How (outside the movies) do you shoot someone who already has a gun to your head? On the other hand, if you deploy your artillery after you've given him the measly $20 and he's waving his arms around in disappointment, is it really self-defence?
Pizza Hut is totally in the wrong for denying their employees the means to protect themselves. Delivering a pizza is not a job worth someone losing their life over. And the problem is this is not a first time occurance. yet Pizza Hut would rather see their employees killed on duty as to see them carry a gun for protection.
Posts: 2042 | Location: Martinsville, IL | Registered: 06-03-02
"Well, I could stop hi-jacking tomorrow . . . if everyone was allowed to carry guns them hi-jackers wouldn't have no superiority. All you gotta do is arm all the passangers, then no hi-jacker would risk pullin' a rod."
In this case, the logic of allowing, even encouraging, the carrying of guns by people who often have difficulty making change for a $20 bill escapes me.
If you guys want to play cowboy, get a Wayback machine. (And a smart dog to operate it.)
Posts: 16163 | Location: Lincoln Place, Granite City, IL, USA | Registered: 06-03-02
If I were a pizza delivery person, I doubt that I would want to carry a weapon for self- (or pizza-) defense. Nor would I want to protect my employer's $20 with my life in a shoot out. And if I were a pizza shop owner, I wouldn't want to pay hazardous duty wages - how much could you charge for a pizza?? And, if I intended to rob a pizza delivery person who carried a sidearm, I'd be sure I had the drop on him, and then I'd get his pizza, his twenty bucks, AND his weapon. IMHO.
An un armed delivery person is automatically a sitting duck. There is no guarantee one way or the other (s)he would come out alive after being robbed. If the delivery person is armed, at the very least they have a chance, a better chance than if they were unarmed at all.
Posts: 2042 | Location: Martinsville, IL | Registered: 06-03-02
'Spiers, who works for Pizza Hut, said it's the first time in 10 years of delivering pizzas that he has been robbed.'www.wcfcourier.com
This has been nagging at me, too. I've nothing against the pizza-delivery profession, it's an honorable job, but ten years? Is that a typo? Surely, after the first year or two, you'd be pushing for promotion to the more demanding dough-rolling or phone-answering roles.
Do people really make careers out of pizza delivery?
About how many Pizza Hut pizzas do you think the average Senator eats in a year? Is there a haute-cuisine, $200-a-head branch somewhere?
Oh, and here's how it was done, apparently...
"But, Mr. Spiers reacted quickly, grabbed the gun hand of the suspect and was able to pull his own gun out at the same time and fire some shots,"www.radioiowa.com
You'd have to be pretty sure you were going to be able to really grab that gun-hand before the gun went off, wouldn't you? And, once you had grabbed the hand, if you were able to continue safely holding it to one side while fetching your own gun out, would emptying your piece in the assailant's general direction then be 'reasonable force'?
Of course, it probably all happened in a split second, without much time for thought, but it seems fishy.
...a better chance than if they were unarmed at all...
That's kind of difficult to quantify, isn't it?
'David Powell, a guy I sang with in my church choir in high school, had a twin brother named John. Both were smart, funny, and well-liked kids. David eventually became a Sheriff’s Deputy, a job he held for 18 years, and which required him to be an expert with firearms of every description. While on duty the morning of November 30, 2002, David Powell responded to a call to investigate gunshots in a neighborhood. He arrived to see an armed man burst into a home and take a woman hostage. Kicking in the door to try to rescue the hostage, David was fired upon twice, one of the bullets hitting him in the right arm and passing through the opening of his bullet-proof vest to lodge in his chest. David Powell died 90 minutes later in the trauma center of the hospital where I was born. The man who killed David Powell was himself shot and killed at the scene by other law enforcement officers. The hostage escaped unharmed.
My point is that despite whatever an individual’s depth of experience and proficiency with firearms, there comes a point at which countering guns with guns becomes little more than Russian Roulette.'Gun Control at Pizza Hut
Wouldn't this be the classic case of what many of the liberal persuasion would refer to as the rich getting richer on the backs of the poor... Must be a lot of money being made by corporate pizza chains for delivery...Yet Pizza Hut thinks more of public perception than they do the life of their employees.
"If the delivery person is armed, at the very least they have a chance, a better chance than if they were unarmed at all."
Back your claim up with some type of facts and figures. Start with your own admission that there is no guarantee that an unarmed driver would come out alive after being robbed. Is there a guarantee that an armed driver will come out alive? Is there some type of guarantee that their own gun won't be taken from them and used in a later homicide of a pizza delivery driver? What is the guarantee against the stick-up guys now just shooting drivers rather than take the chance of their being armed? Prove that the drivers have a better chance with a gun than without. Why would a driver with a gun stand a better chance of getting through an armed confrontation than a cop trained in dealing with such confrontations?
Posts: 16163 | Location: Lincoln Place, Granite City, IL, USA | Registered: 06-03-02
An expression here (and possibly in the UK) in the legal profession is "For every right, there is a remedy." Another factor, possibly the most germane, is that the entire Bill of Rights protects the people from the government, not from each other. http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.billofrights.html
Not an expression we are familiar with.
That's the problem for you new countries: you have to debate 'rights' and create sacred documents callled constitutions, which, like other sacred texts, you can spend the next hundreds of years analysing and debating and also arguing of the true meaning of the words at the time of writing.
We haven't got any (rights, that is). Don't think you'll find anything in writing and of legal effect which formally guarantees freedom of speech or right of assembly or right to privacy over documents at work or anywhere else. (Magna Carta takes the prize for irrelevancy in this regard)
Our Bill of Rights was created to tell the King and Queen, who parliament had just appointed after driving out the last King, what their terms of employment were e.g. not to interfere with the work of their new employers by turning up at the House of Commons or censoring debate there . That's the only 'freedom of speech' we have. It also allowed everyone ( well, everyone Protestant), to keep arms for their own self-defence subject to the laws.
None of the 'rights' in your post would concern us as 'constitutional' matters,something which may avoid a lot of expensive litigation on 'principle'. To an outsider some of the constitutional arguments there seem outright strange, but that's because our lawyers and politicians haven't got a sacred document. We have to invent outright strange arguments using something else!
After wasting my time looking at a half dozen of LR's links, I fail to find one that has any bearing on the relevance of the topic originally introduced. Disgrtuntled former employees getting revenge by robbing the store, delivery person getting robbed by assault with a fire extinguisher, etc. doesn't seem to me to reinforce the argument in favor of delivery person's right to bear arms. Hardly likely to persuade any reasonable reader. IMHO. Many links does not necessarily mean much evidence, sorry!
The list of links does show that Pizza Hut has a consistent policy - that the "drivers carry less than $20" sign is their best protection. If the driver in question didn't like that policy, he was free to look for another job, but he doesn't have much argument against being fired. He's put all the other drivers at risk - they may not get a gun put to their head, but could simply be shot as they walk up to the door.
I don't think it's fair to say that Pizza Hut "thinks more of public perception than they do the life of their employees"; the company is being widely criticised about this case, but is sticking to the policy it thinks best protects its employees.
The would-be robber who was shot doesn't have much to complain about either, but I guess this thread is really about the "if everyone had a gun there would be less crime" idea.
That's impossible to prove; consider countries as different as Iraq, Switzerland, Canada, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Rwanda... The level of crime or public safety is influenced by so many things other than gun ownership and accessibility. Actually, crime levels seem to be kept in check most of all by shared (not imposed) codes of behaviour, by economic fairness and efficiency, by having young men gainfully occupied, and by education. (Have I mentioned before that Texas can predict its future jail-cell needs by looking at school drop-out rates?).
Originally posted by Lighteningrodd: Pizza Hut is totally in the wrong for denying their employees the means to protect themselves. Delivering a pizza is not a job worth someone losing their life over. And the problem is this is not a first time occurance. yet Pizza Hut would rather see their employees killed on duty as to see them carry a gun for protection.
Now is an unarmed pizza man in danger? What is the point in a gunman shooting a pizza man? It's a hold up. It's "Your $20" (or "The extra peperoni with garlic bread and a coke which I ordered") or your life!" It's not "I carry a gun to shoot dead or maim everyone I want to rob,so shall [thereby greatly increasing my chances of being caught and jailed for life without parole]" is it?
The whole point is in the threat. The victim doesn't value the pizza or the $20 to the extent of finding out whether the man is crazy enough to shoot him if he tries to protect either. Chances are he isn't (see above) but why risk it? Of course if you are stupid enough to be a pizza man with a gun and you pull it,the gunman might then be panicked into shooting , if only to protect himself
)
And, if I intended to rob a pizza delivery person who carried a sidearm, I'd be sure I had the drop on him, and then I'd get his pizza, his twenty bucks, AND his weapon. IMHO.
