“A suburban New York family’s happy Thanksgiving celebration turned into a horror when a man broke into their home and assaulted an elderly relative,” foxnews.com reports. “The family had just gone to bed Thursday when cops say Jeffrey Rice (above) slipped into the home in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island’s north shore through an unlocked door and grabbed a knife. Police said Rice then sneaked upstairs, where he attacked the homeowner’s 85-year-old aunt with his fists. The woman had just fallen asleep in a bedroom she was sharing with her 7-year-old grandniece, the daughter of the 37-year-old homeowner and his wife.”
Unless you’re in a Hollywood movie, you have a greater chance of winning the lottery than being the victim of a random home invasion, especially one by a whack job. But if such a thing did occur, you’d probably want to be armed in defense of yourself and your loved ones. Turns out that one member of the Long Island family in question was armed, just not ballistically.
“My daughter was in the room and escaped, ran downstairs and told my in-laws to call 911, which I had already done from upstairs,” she said.
The woman said she and her husband tried to grab the knife. She said they eventually subdued the intruder with the help of her brother and brother-in-law.
“He was definitely on drugs, maybe PCP or something,” she told a local TV station. “He was completely hallucinating. He took some swings at my husband. Our bed is shattered in our room and, you know, my husband had a baseball bat.”
People who favor civilian disarmament would consider this family lucky — in the sense that the lack of a firearm meant that no one was shot. People who cherish their natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms would also consider the family lucky — in the sense that the psycho didn’t murder any family members before the good guys with guns arrived.
Equally, I reckon most pro-gun folks would rue the day said disturbed individual wasn’t shot. Sad, perhaps, but true. And an entirely defensible position, at least legally.