Armed Robbery Caught on Camera in Chicago

Screen capture by Boch via X

Safe neighborhoods just don’t exist in Chicago. Armed robberies happen everywhere. And while violent armed robberies by carloads of thugs cruising in carjacked rides happen routinely, those who don’t practice good situational awareness make themselves extra appealing, soft targets.  Especially in well-heeled neighborhoods.

Take Gregory Poulos and his wife, Angie Beltsos, for instance. You can see them casually walking up to their front door while not paying a lick of attention to the traffic on the divided street out front. When a car lurched to a stop without any apparent reason, neither noticed.  An instant later, when the first hooded punk hopped out, neither one of them noticed that either.  Not until the first offender had already crossed the street pointing a gun at them did either Poulos or Beltsos see the threat.  Then they needed a fraction of a second to break the denial response.  “This can’t be happening!”

Imagine if the husband, a Navy veteran, had noticed the car suddenly slow down in an inappropriate manner.  Activity “outside the baseline of normalcy” as the tell-tale potential pre-violence indicator is described in Left of Bang. At that point he could have hustled his wife behind cover on the porch, drawn his pistol and defended their lives. Instead he retreated, allowing his wife to hang out there fully exposed all by herself, closest to the thugs. At that point, he couldn’t throw his stuff at his robbers fast enough.

In the news report he credited his Navy training for saving him. Maybe he served in the French Navy. Last time we checked, US sailors aren’t trained to surrender to victimization, or to start throwing their clothing toward their assailants. Maybe it was different under the Biden or Obama Department of Defense.

There’s a reason those bad guys were prowling the very affluent Glenview neighborhood in Chicagoland. Those wealthy, wine-drinking, reliably Democrat-voting residents typically don’t like guns and don’t pack heat for self-defense. Instead, they surrender their stuff rather eagerly.  Later they wax eloquent about how scared they were.

Do they seek out training to learn how to avoid becoming a victim? Do they get strapped so they might have a fighting chance should situational awareness and command presence fail them when the next carload of young Chicago Public School scholars cruises by?

Time will tell with this couple, but if the community’s attitudes as a whole continue on their present trajectory, this whole incident will be forgotten. Until it happens again, to someone else.

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11 thoughts on “Armed Robbery Caught on Camera in Chicago”

  1. .40 cal Booger

    In this situation:

    They are very lucky to have not been seriously injured or killed. It wasn’t his navy training that saved them, it was chance and this was their very-lucky super-duper-very-good-day.

    There is a 94% chance of being seriously injured or killed if you comply or resist with other than a firearm (or try to flee).

    There is a (less than a) 7% chance of being seriously injured or killed if you resist with a firearm (and ‘stand your ground’).

  2. .40 cal Booger

    Government Says You Don’t Deserve Machine Guns, Here’s Why That Should Scare You!

    “…
    If the government doesn’t have a duty to protect you (as the courts have ruled)… why are they trying so hard to limit how you protect yourself?

    ‘Because machine guns are not in common use… they are ‘dangerous and unusual’ and undeserving of Second Amendment protection.’

    First it was machine guns. Then AR-15s. Next? Your Glock. Your magazines. Your ability to say ‘no.’

    This case isn’t just about one man. It’s about a government that’s slowly deciding which of your rights are too dangerous to allow.

    … before your rights are ruled out of ‘common use.’

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCVBhEAXM5Q

  3. .40 cal Booger

    Navy Training Instructor: “This here is the United States Navy. We fight the enemy, we overcome the enemy, we defeat the enemy . Is that Understood?!”

    Navy Trainee Gregory Poulos: “Sir! Yes Sir! We surrender immediately and take our clothes off and throw them at the enemy!”

    And what the heck is wrong with that woman? She actually goes towards the bad guys.

    And Gregory, he steps back in surrender putting her out front further from him. His first thought is not of protecting her.

    It reminds me of an old joke a Vietnam war vet told me:

    One day a young soldier on his first tour in Vietnam encounters a Vietnamese man and wife on a path. The woman was walking behind the man about 10 paces. The soldier asks the man why his wife was walking behind him instead of with him. The Vietnamese man says “Tradition.”.

    The war went on. Towards the end of the war the young soldier, now on his third tour in Vietnam, sees the same Vietnamese man and wife on a path, he had encountered a few years ago, but this time the wife is walking in front of the man about 40 paces. He greets the Vietnamese man and says “I thought it was tradition that your wife walk behind you but she’s walking ahead of you now. Why is that?”

    The Vietnamese man replies “land mines.”

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