Good Guy with a Gun #328: Philadelphia, PA

A 16-year-old sticking a fake gun in your back seems no different from an adult and a real gun. | Original incident: September 29, 2024

Sep 24, 2026

These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is essentially the same as the calendar version.

Just after 11 on a Sunday night, a 21-year-old man was walking to his car in Philadelphia’s Kensington section with his girlfriend when two people approached him. One of them pressed something into his back, said it was a gun, and told him he was being robbed.

The robber wanted his keys, his wallet, and anything else of value.

“At that point, the victim began to produce the items that were demanded by the robber, but he was also in possession of a legal firearm,” Philadelphia police Inspector D.F. Pace said.

In the middle of it, the man produced his own gun, a 9mm. He turned and fired three times. A neighbor heard it:

We heard gunshots, bang, bang, bang. We looked out and saw somebody running and a guy running. It’s unusual on this block.

The second robber ran off. The first one dropped his gun.

It was a toy.

As Pace said:

After the victim opened fire on the robbers, that gun was dropped and it was recovered by police and it is now in police custody and we now know it to be a fake gun. But again, having been pressed into the victim’s back, there would have been no way for the victim to have known that.

Right. A gun in your back is a gun in your back.

The robber turned out to be 16. He went to a children’s hospital in stable condition and in police custody, and he was expected to face charges. Police were still looking for his partner, a man in a dark hooded sweatshirt.

The victim wasn’t hurt. He picked his belongings up off the street, stayed, cooperated, and turned over his gun. Police said he’d acted in self-defense.

6abc’s Data Journalism Team said that 27 self-defense shootings took place in the City of Brotherly Love in the prior year. That’s just Philly. How many were there in the US?