I think the best argument for our Second Amendment's right to bear arms is that the elderly, the disabled and those otherwise vulnerable do not have to live in fear but can protect themselves with a licensed gun.
That's just what a 91-year-old man in Florida did when he repelled two home invaders with his 38 caliber revolver to protect his wife of 72 years.
Terror erupted in the Johnsons' heavily barred house on Lake Stanley Road shortly after 4 p.m. Tuesday as the couple watched TV news. She was sitting in her wheelchair. He was sitting nearby on the sofa.
That's when a stranger stepped through the back door.
"What are you doing? What are you doing?" Berlie Mae Johnson, 90, remembered asking as the man stepped on her shiny-clean tile floor. "By then, he had the gun to my head. I don't know what all I said."
The man ordered the couple: "Be quiet. Don't say a word. Don't move."
Overcome by shock and fear, Berlie Mae Johnson said she couldn't move as a second man wearing a stocking over his face started to come through a sliding-glass door from the backyard.
"It's terrible. You don't know what [they're] going to do. You expect at any moment . . ." she said, her voice breaking. "I can't hold up. My nerves are shot. He'd probably have killed me."
But the love of her life was ready.
Her husband, who goes by Johnny, had his stainless-steel Police Special revolver tucked under a cushion on the sofa. He has been protective, she said, ever since they met at a Church of God service in Cocoa during the Great Depression.
"You don't think, man. You do what you have to do," Johnson said of how he grabbed his revolver as the second intruder entered. "He saw the gun and, boy, he was gone."
Shifting his aim, Johnson fired at the man still holding a gun to his wife's head.
"I shot as plain in his middle as I could have," said Johnson, describing how the man jumped and ran out the door. "I think I missed."