An armed society is a polite society. And an order of protection is paper-thin. And the only thing that stops a bad girl with evil in her heart is a good guy with a gun. All of those truisms converged in Alton, Illinois this week as a woman entered a store Tuesday morning, attacked and seriously injured an employee by pistol-whipping them and then was shot by another employee who was legally packing heat.

It happened at a Rent-A-Center in Alton. Remarkably, after soaking up three shots, the angry armed woman left the store before being found a few blocks away.

KMOV has the story . . .

A woman was shot after she reportedly went into an Alton store and hit an employee in the head with a gun.

The woman entered the Rent-A-Center on Homer Adams Parkway around 10 a.m. Tuesday to confront a relative who worked there, Police Chief Jarrett Ford said. There was reportedly an active order of protection prohibiting contact with her relative and from being at the store.

An argument between the two escalated into a physical fight. During the fight, the woman hit the employee in the head with a gun, Alton Fire Battalion Chief Derrick Richardson told News 4. Another employee then shot the woman three times.

After being shot, the woman got into a car and drove off. She was found injured inside a car at Claire and Seminary streets. She was taken to a local hospital and later flown to a St. Louis hospital for treatment.

The person hit in the head with the gun suffered a serious head injury and is being treated at the hospital, Chief Richardson said.

Striking someone in the head certainly rises to the level of a potentially crippling injury. Especially when the instrument used is a firearm.

Good work on the part of the good Samaritan for stopping the attack by the armed woman with a little judicious use of force.

As for the woman leaving the store after taking three bullets, and then driving away… that should tell you something about the “stopping power” of handguns. Still, the armed employee’s actions were a win in stopping what could have been a deadly attack  Except that the armed employee has probably already been terminated by corporate officials who typically have no compassion for peons defending themselves or their co-workers while on the job.