I have a 3” barreled Stainless Smith and Wesson .357 loaded with .38+P ammo for the wife in the bedroom safe. It sits next to my Glock 21 .45 ACP with two extra mags. I would consider getting the short barrel for your wife as it is harder for a perp to wrestle the gun away from her and the shorter barrel length does not matter so much at the ranges the gun will be used. The drawbacks to the short barrel is greater muzzle blast and a shorter sight radius.
Shot-up 2 suspected in robbery identified
SPENCER WILLEMS
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Little Rock police identified two men suspected of attempting to rob a southwest Little Rock grocery store owner early Wednesday and then being shot by him.
Demario Lamont Harris, 18, and James Alex Parker, 22, both of No. 8 Par Circle in Little Rock, will face charges they attempted to rob Joe’s Grocery and Deli, said Little Rock police spokesman Lt. Terry Hastings. The men dialed 911 from an Interstate 430 on-ramp at Colonel Glenn Road to seek help regarding gunshot wounds police say were suffered during the robbery.
Harris, who had a gunshot wound in a leg, was listed in stable condition at Baptist Health Medical Center, Hastings said.
Parker was in critical condition at the same hospital, Hastings said, after he took gunshots in the arm and chest.
Hastings said the suspects initially gave investigators fake names and no formal charges had been filed. But, he said, that will change soon.
“They’re still under our guard at the hospital,” Hastings said. “They’ll be charged once they’re released.”
While Harris and Parker were receiving treatment Thursday, Joe Alley, the proprietor of Joe’s Grocery and Deli, was getting back to work.
“I didn’t need any time away,” Alley said just 30 hours after he emptied his .357-Magnum revolver at two robbers. “I feel safer here than I do anywhere else.” [NO KIDDING!!!]
Alley has owned and run the convenience and grocery store tucked away at 12223 Colonel Glenn Road since 1979, two years after moving to Little Rock from Florida. In those 31 years, he’d never been robbed, and to his recollection, he’d never even had a shoplifter.
The familiar routine of the store hadn’t been much disturbed until two men in black hoods, one of them carrying a black, 9mm, semiautomatic handgun, rushed through his doors just before 10 a.m. Wednesday.
“Everyone who comes here is very friendly. Very nice people,” Alley said. “I don’t think we’ve had to call the police more than twice in the past few years ... and then it wasn’t anything serious.”
Alley said he had little time to react once he saw the men running past the window and through his door. The 59-year-old store owner said he obliged a robber’s demands to “give me the money, give me the money” and he even opened the reserve money he kept beneath the counter.
When the gunman walked back out from behind the counter after having leapt over it, Alley said, he saw the man raising his pistol at him. Alley said he had heard stories of robbers shooting employees even after they had what they came for.
Alley said there was no fear or adrenaline pumping through him, just a lack of hesitation. He reached for his old .357, a gun that had sat under the counter ever since he took over the store, and started firing.
“In a situation like that, you can only react,” Alley said. “It all happened so fast. ... You just do what you have to do.”
Alley fired six rounds at the robbers and watched them stumble and bleed over his sidewalk out the front door, dropping their gun and the money along the way.
He said the robber he’d shot in the chest limped back to his car and took off toward the interstate on Colonel Glenn Road while the robber he’d shot in the leg slowly crawled along the pavement and around the store.
The robber in the car whipped around after a few blocks, Alley said, and sped back, driving through a wooden fence to pick up his partner.
“I guess he forgot about him,” Alley said. “He was halfway to the interstate and realized he forgot his buddy.”
Customers were steadily coming in and out of the store Thursday afternoon, asking Alley if he was all right. He said he wasn’t hurt. The closest thing to an injury he got was when he fired his gun, which packs a good kick, and an even louder bang.
“I couldn’t hear for the next two hours,” Alley said. “It’s not the kick on [the .357] that’s so bad; it’s the noise.” The blood and the damage had been cleaned up by the time customers visited the store Thursday. The only sign of the robbery was a bullet hole he’d put in the frame of his front door.
“That was the only one I missed,” Alley said. Hastings said police will be investigating Harris’ and Parker’s possible involvement with a chain of unsolved armed robberies that occurred throughout southwest Little Rock over the past few months.
“They’ll be looking to see if they were involved in those prior robberies,” Hastings said. “But it’s still too early to speak to that. We haven’t even had a chance to talk with them enough.”