Stardate 20030110.1747

(On Screen): Here's an American moment:

When 74-year-old J.C. Adams saw three would-be robbers walk into his convenience store, he grabbed his shotgun with one hand and balanced himself on his walker with the other.

On a surveillance monitor, he saw two men and a woman hold up an employee at the cash register. That's when Adams pushed his walker to the front of the store and confronted the armed suspects, killing one man and wounding the other. An employee held the woman until police arrived.

"No need to let something like that live," said Adams, who had been wounded in a May 2000 robbery attempt in which he killed another intruder.

His body was weak, but his spirit was strong and his courage indomitable. Old and gray and feeble, he was willing to fight for what was his, and not give in to anyone and let them take it.

He's my kind of man.

Police said Friday that Adams would not be charged in the shooting death Thursday of Cameron Lemont Glover, 17. Glover's 19-year-old brother, Leonard, and Tammy Crystal Jones, 17, were charged with armed robbery.

Until three years ago, Adams said he kept a .38 handgun in his store, but he switched to a shotgun after yet another robbery.

"I shot at the guy and missed," he said. "You can't do anything with a .38."

Damned straight.

He won't be prosecuted, and Americans everywhere are cheering for this old bastard. Part of why he won't be prosecuted is that there's no chance whatever that a jury in Georgia would convict him of anything. (I doubt they'd deliberate more than half an hour.)

Our overseas friends would do well to contemplate this example. What's remarkable about Adams is that he isn't remarkable. There are millions of Americans who would do exactly the same thing in the same circumstances. We don't give up what's ours just because someone else demands it, whether at gunpoint, or via crashed jetliners, or through diplomatic denunciations and accusations of unilateralism.

Whether it's small (a couple hundred dollars in a cash register) or big (thousand of dead in a terrorist attack) or mammoth (yielding our civil rights through acceptance of treaties), what we care about is worth fighting for, or else it isn't worth anything at all.