When I search for material for our It Should Have Been a Defensive Gun Use posts I usually select stories where defenseless Americans are brutalized by armed thugs of one stripe or another. But this story at abc22now.com caught my eye because it seems so mundane. No one was injured. And yet . . . Well, see for yourself . . .
DAYTON — A family was awakened early Saturday morning to the sound of intruders in their Harvard Boulevard home.
According to Dayton police, a 911 caller said two males gained entry through a bathroom window just after midnight Jan. 2, 2016, and forced the family — including a husband, wife and two grandchildren — out of their beds and into the living room while they went through the home and took various items.
The family told police the suspects carried pump-action shotguns.
While the family was being held in the living room, they heard a woman coming home. They heard her through the door and reportedly told the suspects not to shoot.
That woman evidently heard their plea and ran next door. She told police later that she saw the two suspects run from the house. She said she thinks she heard the voice of one of the suspects before but couldn’t tell police who it was.
A PlayStation 3, a backpack, Dell laptop and call phone were reported stolen from the home.
As of this writing, the perps remain at large. And that’s it. Only not really. The matter-of-fact text doesn’t do justice to the horrors suffered by four innocent Americans at the hands of two shotgun-wielding criminals. The inevitable psychological effects of the home invasion.
The FBI does not keep statistics on “home invasions,” also known as “hot burglaries” (where the home owners are inside). They lump the stats with all forms of burglary. “In 2014, there were an estimated 1,729,806 burglaries,” fbi.gov reports. If one percent of those were home invasions, that’s 17,298 incidents.
Gun control advocates would have you believe that incidents like the one described above argue for gun control – as if the bad guys would be deterred by restrictions on Americans’ natural, civil and Constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Anyone else who contemplates that crime – who really thinks about it – would want to have armed self-defense. And so they do.