Stephanie Dilyard is lucky to be alive.
Yet last week, 7-Eleven fired the 25-year-old after she used her gun to save her own life. Private companies have every right to set rules for employee behavior, but many corporate policies that require workers to remain passive and comply with criminals’ demands rest on a deeply mistaken view of crime data.
“He threatened me,” Dilyard told Fox 25 in Oklahoma City. “[A]nd said he was gonna slice my head off, and that’s when I tried to call the police. He started throwing things at me, came behind the counter. I tried to run off, but he grabbed his hands around my neck, and pushed me out of the counter space, and that’s when I pulled out my gun and I shot him.”
“I had to choose between my job and my life,” she said. “And I will always choose my life because people depend on me. My kids need me here.”
She survived with wounds to her neck and hands – injuries that could have been far worse.
Her attacker, 59-year-old Kenneth Thompson, already had an outstanding felony warrant for a parole violation. For his latest crimes, prosecutors have charged him with assault and battery, threatening acts of violence, and attempting to pass a fake bill.
For more than two years, Dilyard worked the dangerous 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift alone. Despite those conditions, 7-Eleven insisted she use only “store items” to defend herself.
Unfortunately, while some in the media and many businesses may concede that passive behavior by store clerks might encourage more crime, they believe that passive behavior is still the safest course of action.
In Stephanie Dilyard’s case, however, passive behavior likely would have gotten her killed. And while there is a kernel of truth behind the advice to remain passive when confronted by a criminal, the claim is highly misleading. Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey shows that passive behavior appears slightly safer than all forms of active resistance combined – but that comparison lumps together very different actions.
For women, the most dangerous form of resistance is to fight with their fists, because doing so often triggers a violent physical reaction from the attacker. The next most dangerous choice is to run. Escaping is ideal when possible, but women generally run more slowly than men, and being tackled can produce serious injury. Other options such as using a baseball bat or a knife turn out not to be a lot better because women are at a disadvantage whenever they come into physical contact with a male attacker.
By contrast, the safest option for a woman confronted by a criminal is to have a gun. Women who rely on passive behavior are 2.5 times more likely to suffer serious injury than women who defend themselves with a firearm.
Criminals are almost always men, and when a man is attacking a woman there is on average a much larger strength difference than when a man is attacking another man. The presence of a gun represents a much bigger relative change in a woman’s ability to protect herself than it does for a man. Firearms act as a powerful equalizer between the sexes.
Murder rates fall when either men or women carry concealed handguns, but the reduction is especially large for women. Each additional woman with a concealed-carry permit lowers the female murder rate by roughly three to four times more than each additional male permit holder lowers the male murder rate. States that allowed women to carry concealed handguns on a nondiscretionary basis also experience about 25% fewer rapes than states that restrict or forbid concealed carry.
Police are extremely important in stopping crime, but the police can’t be there all the time. The police themselves understand that they virtually always arrive on the crime scene after the crime has occurred.
And that raises a real question: What should people do when they’re having to confront a criminal by themselves? As Stephanie Dilyard learned the hard way, people ultimately must take responsibility for their own safety – and for women, carrying a gun is the safest option.
Fortunately, Stephanie’s children still have their mother.
