Beach shooting was tragic, but justified under 2nd amendment

Johnny Marocco Williams' timing was terrific. His luck was terrible.

On Saturday night - just four days after the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that Americans have a constitutional right to own handguns - the 41-year-old Hampton man decided to stick up a pizza joint in Virginia Beach.

In doing so, he provided a timely lesson in the Second Amendment.

When Williams crept through the back door of Dominick's Pizza and Pasta on Holland Road with a bandana over his face, he gambled on two things:

That the safe was full of cash and the owner was unarmed.

He was wrong on both.

The safe - the one that Williams ordered Ferdinando Abbondante to open - contained just one item.

A 9 mm Berretta.

Unfortunately for Williams, Abbondante, the father of three and a former security guard, also knew how to use it.

"Nerves of steel," is how Abbondante's business partner and father-in-law, Roger Stephens, described him.

In interviews, Abbondante said he told the robber to just empty the cash register and get out.

Williams, however, was adamant that the owner unlock that safe.

The Italian immigrant did just that. Then he turned around and shot Williams to death.

If supporters of the Second Amendment had been looking for a textbook case of how gun ownership is supposed to work, they got it. An outlaw entered a restaurant brandishing a weapon and left on a gurney because a law-abiding gun owner decided to protect himself and his employees.

At this point in the investigation, Virginia Beach police have little to say other than shots were fired at the pizzeria Saturday night and the bad guy died.

"That's about it," said police spokesman Jimmy Barnes. "All indications are he (Abbondante) did nothing wrong."

Stephens told me that the dead man's weapon might have been a toy gun. The police had no comment, but Barnes noted that whether or not a weapon is real is usually immaterial.

Fear for your life is what matters in self-defense.

If Williams had been smart - and few criminals are - he would have driven to Washington to stage a holdup. D.C.'s unconstitutional handgun ban still guarantees that most citizens can't protect themselves. That will soon change, when the District enacts new gun laws.

I tried to reach Abbondante on Monday, but he wasn't at the pizza place that's named for his 7-year-old son. He was at the hospital with a worker who'd been splattered with the dead man's blood. Williams was HIV positive, Stephens said, so in addition to sanitizing the restaurant, workers were receiving medical evaluations.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Abbondante wasn't gloating. He told reporters that he wasn't "proud" of what he'd done but that his actions had been intended to save the lives of innocent people.

There's little doubt of that.

It's a pity that anyone had to die. But it was Williams himself who set those deadly events in action.

Kerry Dougherty, (757) 446-2306, kerry.dougherty@cox.net