Let’s go further and say that self-defense is bad. The big problem with seeing this as a gun issue is that even if the store owner had just punched the thuglet and on the way down the thuglet had hit his head on the corner of the pizza mixer and died, the press and the police would be all over the pizzeria guy. You’re simply not supposed to fight back in today’s culture.
I was at a police event a couple of weeks ago (I have a family member on the force in a Western city) and the whole thing was about how respectful the officers were of the criminal class. That is, occasionally they had to “neutralize” one of them, but normally every effort had been made not to perturb “the gentleman” (aka, the thuglet). Of course, the mother of said thuglet immediately appears at the police station with the Reverend So-and-So in tow, as well as a cluster of press admirers, to scream about police brutality...
Things are crazy now.
Seems to a common term used by police to describe thugs, as in; "The gentleman fired at us and we returned fire killing him instantly."