How many guns? "A lot," Baker said
Jeweler recalls day of robbery
BY GORDON HICKEY
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER(Richmond, Virginia)
Gary Baker still keeps a .357-caliber handgun on his desk.
Gary Baker was face to face with a masked man holding a .45-caliber handgun, and for just a split second, he didn't know what to do.
He thought that maybe he was seeing things or that someone was playing some kind of a joke.
Then another masked man closer to the front door of Baker's jewelry store let fly with a blast from a .12-gauge sawed-off shotgun, shattering a display case. Baker opened up.
When the gunfire stopped, two masked robbers lay dead.
Looking back on that event a little more than seven years ago, Baker would change one thing: He'd be quicker on the trigger.
He has had plenty of time to reflect on his actions that day, Dec. 2, 1994. "Mentally, I've always said I won't wait so long to shoot."
Baker is a calm, reasonable, well-spoken and well-armed advocate for every person's right to take up arms in defense of life and property. He keeps a .357-caliber on his desk, but he's no vigilante, is not a member of the National Rifle Association and stopped hunting years ago because he killed a deer and "it was a very sickening feeling."
But he has no remorse for the two men killed in his store. He believes they had it coming.
They were Thomas Jefferson Salter, 56, of Nashville, and William Lawrence Head, 71, of New Orleans.
The shooting began at 10:25 a.m. on Dec. 2, 1994, a Friday. Salter, armed with a .45, jumped onto a counter right in front of Baker's desk. Head, armed with a shotgun, was at the door.
When Salter died, he was a suspect in a string of bank and jewelry store holdups in the Nashville, Tenn., area. He also was wanted by the FBI for the theft of an $850,000 collection of rare stamps in Raleigh, N.C.
Head's criminal career spanned half a century. He was suspected of robbing numerous jewelry stores and banks, committing burglaries and smuggling tons of marijuana in from Mexico.
Since the shootout at his Beverly Hills Jewelers store, Baker has become something of a spokesman for the right to bear arms. He can't understand why some stores and other businesses have a policy against fighting back.
Shortly after the gunfight at Beverly Hills, a woman came into the store and said she knew of a local motel that had a policy against guns.
"I'm not going to do that to my people here," Baker said. "It is their option to defend themselves."
Asked whether he thinks about that day, Baker said, "I think about it every day.
"I thought about it before it happened, and that's why we survived."
A long counter runs almost all the way around the inside of the store. A clerk standing behind that counter is always within reach of a gun. One after another, the butt ends stick out like so many cannons on a galleon.
How many guns? "A lot," Baker said with a smile.
The store is stocked with .38-caliber and .357-caliber handguns, which are easy to maintain and use.
"We constantly review where the guns are. We constantly remind ourselves to stay separate."
He keeps at least one more employee in the store than he needs. "We want to avoid the war if any way possible." But he added, "We want to win."
Beverly Hills isn't only ready for robbers, it's also unusually stacked against burglars. When the employees leave at night, they put boards with nails driven through them on the floor. Trip wires, strobe lights and bells and whistles so loud no one would be able to stand them are designed to keep criminals away.
Baker also has installed a machine that would fill the store with smoke in seconds, smoke so thick a burglar would have trouble finding anything, including his way out.
Baker hasn't lost any sleep over what happened that day in 1994. The men he and his two employees beat in that gunfight were hard-core criminals.
Is he troubled at having killed a human being? "Not in this particular case, no. . . . Society would have been better off if somebody had shot those two guys 20 years ago.
"It was so cut and dried. You fight or die."
