Last week my family visited a Home Depot in Charlotte.  This store has access to the adjacent shopping center through a public rear entrance.  Suddenly, directly in front of us, a group of thugs sprinted out the door with shopping carts loaded with expensive tools and products.  They threw the stuff into the back of their waiting getaway car, jumped in, and sped away, their empty carts spinning in the middle of the street.

Nobody followed them out.  Bewildered onlookers stared in shock.  By the time I fully understood what had happened, it was too late to look for a license plate or to make any attempt to stop them.  They felt no need for disguise, and laughed as they escaped with their easy pickings. It was clearly not their first rodeo.

I had seen this “grab and run” maneuver before at another Home Depot in Charlotte, and it is common these days in news reports from liberal cities across the country.

I went in to check on the employee greeter assigned to the door.  A recent immigrant, he sadly admitted Home Depot employees are forbidden to take any action during these crimes and are fired if they do.  All he could do was call the store manager and report the incident.  He said this happens all the time.  My wife talked to another employee in the store who said she once yelled at a young thief busting out the door and he laughed back, “you can’t stop me!”

I chatted with other witnesses, and everyone agreed that it will only get worse because the thugs know that (a) Home Depot does not hire armed security guards, (b) they will not allow their employees to respond to the thefts, and (c) even if the thugs do accidentally get caught by police, they will be back on the street in a few hours due to lax prosecution policies in liberal cities.

We all agreed that the wildly accelerating prices at Home Depot and other retailers are largely due to these “tolerant” theft policies.  I recently bought a package of copper wire at Lowe’s and had to get a manager to remove it from a locked cage.  He apologized, explaining that all of their stores had a promotion on wire, and their end-cap displays were emptied out the first day with losses in the tens of thousands of dollars per store.

Ask yourself why honest citizens who work to pay for their purchases should have to subsidize the party habits of local thugs?  How have the corporate executives, elected officials, district attorneys and judges become supporters of these creeps, at our expense?

We can restore law and order.  But it won’t happen unless we, the honest people, let all the above enablers know we are sick of their tolerance of crime.  If you are tired of rampant crime and higher prices, be careful how you vote.  And it wouldn’t hurt to let the corporate offices know how you feel, too.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side