Longtime Lawrence County gun shop owner Donald Pieri, 60, has seen his business burglarized three times and figured someday someone might try to rob him at gunpoint, too.

It finally happened Tuesday morning and he was ready.

"I didn't panic," he said yesterday. "I always planned for this. You have to think it out."

Confronted by a masked gunman at his Triangle Gun Shop in Perry, which he has run for more than three decades, he made a break for his office, grabbed his own gun and scared the guy off.

State police later charged Jeffrey Ierino, 32, of Wampum, Lawrence County, with attempted robbery and other offenses after tracking him to his house.

Mr. Pieri was sitting behind the counter talking with Pennsylvania Department of Transportation consultant Paul Butera about a road project outside the shop when the masked man walked in at 11:24 a.m.

The robber waved a semiautomatic in their faces, then tossed a canvas bag to Mr. Pieri and ordered him to fill it with pistols.

At first, Mr. Pieri thought it was a prank. But when he realized it wasn't, he suddenly dived behind a door leading into the back room and retrieved his own pistol from his office desktop.

He has a license to carry it, he said, but he doesn't wear the gun in the shop because he figures it would take too long to pull it in an emergency.

Instead, he said, ducking for the door is the better move.

"I knew he couldn't get a shot off in time," he said. "He was in command, and what I did was reverse it."

The action startled the gunman, who left the shop and took off in a car. Troopers returned yesterday to hunt for the gun outside the shop, where they think Mr. Ierino might have ditched it as he ran.

He proved fairly easy to catch.

Mr. Pieri said many people in the area had reported seeing a suspicious car driving around the shop in the morning, and at least two witnesses wrote down the license plate.

Within a couple of hours, troopers tracked Mr. Ierino to his house, but they said he ran off when they showed up. They caught him at a bar a block away.

Mr. Ierino, who has a long criminal record in Lawrence, Butler and Beaver counties, is charged with attempted robbery, attempted theft, illegal possession of a gun, carrying a gun without a license, terroristic threats and simple assault.

He was held in the Lawrence County Jail on $25,000 bond.

Mr. Pieri was fielding lots of calls yesterday from people who heard what had happened.

"I'll probably be hearing from the NRA [National Rifle Association]," he said.