STATE LINE, Idaho -- Confronted by a masked man who pulled an apparent handgun and demanded money, a tobacco shop clerk pulled his own .40 caliber handgun and shot the intruder 10 times, killing him, a Kootenai County sheriff's officer said Tuesday.
Killed was Joseph Kalani Hatchie, 47, of Otis Orchards, Wash. Sheriff's Capt. Ben Wolfinger said Hatchie entered Lew's Smoke Shop shortly before 8 p.m. Monday, wearing a gray ski mask.
The masked man aimed his weapon at the clerk's chest and demanded money, Wolfinger said.
The clerk told sheriff's deputies that he reached under the counter for a bag, came up instead with his semiautomatic and started firing.
When deputies and medics arrived, Hatchie was lying dead on the floor.
The weapon found with Hatchie turned out to be an air-powered pellet gun that looks identical to a Walther P-9 semiautomatic, Wolfinger said.
Hatchie came into the store with a fake gun, presumably confident that his victim would be so afraid of a gunlike object that he would quail in unquestioning fear. Whereupon said victim, apparently not as cowed as the vermin had expected, produced a real gun and blew Hatchie's sorry hiney to Kingdom Come. In more enlightened areas of the country, where guns are considered uncouth, Hatchie would have been absolutely correct. It's like the great Robert Heinlein said: An armed society is a polite society. And a society where the "victim" is better armed than the criminal and knows it is a society not run by those criminals.
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