His is the other face of the shopkeeper’s rage, the one that draws cheers from crime-weary citizens and business owners. At his store last week, Mr. Drame watched on the dozens of televisions on display as Mr. Augusto spoke about the Harlem shooting. “How are you going to rob an old man like that?” Mr. Drame said in disgust.

He opened his store nine years ago, after stints working as a fishmonger, a parking attendant and a cleaner of vendors’ carts.

“I worked so hard, and they wanted to take what is mine,” Mr. Drame, 35, said of the men who tried to hold him up.

Mr. Drame, who has five children, grabbed the man’s gun and started firing. When it was over, one of the robbers was dead, and another died in the hospital. The other two men fled.

Mr. Drame spent a few weeks in Kings County Hospital Center, then went back to work, installing security cameras that cover every approach to his store. If anything, the shooting gave him new strength, he said: “I didn’t come to America to die.”

Many of the stores where owners made stands over the years have vanished. Gone is the delicatessen on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan where, in 1930, Adolph Sargenti fired two bullets into the temple of a robber in a shabby suit who rifled through the cash register. So is La Cabana, the restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where Rafael Disla fatally shot robbers in two separate episodes in 1991.

Leonard Rosenthal owned the Gold Star Jewelry Store in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, for almost 20 years until he died of cancer in 2006, said his wife, Marina Rosenthal. She spoke at her daughter’s New Jersey home this week about the aftermath of the robbery that took place at the store 15 years ago.