Once again, a handgun saving lives (the ones worth saving, anyway)

Tuesday, a 14-year-old boy in Corpus Christi, Texas faced the horror of a knife wielding home invader threatening to kill both him and his mother. The thug tied them up in the bedroom, and proceeded to loot the house. While he was busy with his larceny, the mother managed to escape the bonds with which she was tied, and release her son. By the time their attacker realized they were free, she had retrieved her husband's handgun from where it was hidden, and given it to her son. While she tried to hold the bedroom door shut, the enraged scum repeatedly said that he was going to kill them both. As his superior strength began to win out, slowly forcing the door open, the young man fired a single shot through the growing opening, hitting the assailant in the head, killing him.

I will not try to claim that a handgun saved Rose Ann Kozlowski's and her son's lives. To do so would be to make the same mistake the civilian disarmament advocates make, when they blame guns for all the suicides and murders committed with guns. I would also be doing an injustice to these courageous people--it was their courage and their resourcefulness that saved them--not the gun's. Guns have no such qualities, any more than they can have the quality of evil. The gun did what guns do--expelled a bullet in the direction it was pointed when its trigger was pulled. When the puller of the trigger is an evil person, pointing the gun at an innocent person, evil is done. When the puller of the trigger is an innocent person, pointing the gun at a person who can most improve the world by departing it, good is done. Fortunately, the latter is what happened Tuesday in Corpus Christi.

Today, a brave young man and his equally brave mother are alive because they had access to a means of defending themselves, along with the courage and will to use it. Also today, the predatory thug population is lower by one than it was two days ago. That handgun has helped, in more ways than one, to make the world a better place.