This story is interesting in several ways. One, it's near home. Two, it illustrates an interesting point
Police said two children, ages 3 and 3 months, were inside the home at 1261 Grove Ave. about 10:30 a.m. when a burglar pried open a rear sliding glass door with a crowbar. The startled homeowner fired off seven rounds from a .380 handgun … The bullets hit the suspect, 45-year-old Michael Collins, in the head and arm, police said. Collins had parked his van in the home's driveway and tried to drive away but crashed a couple hundred feet away in an orange grove, they added. Officers apprehended Collins, who was airlifted to Lakeland Regional Hospital for treatment for his injuries. He is expected to recover.
Police said two children, ages 3 and 3 months, were inside the home at 1261 Grove Ave. about 10:30 a.m. when a burglar pried open a rear sliding glass door with a crowbar. The startled homeowner fired off seven rounds from a .380 handgun
…
The bullets hit the suspect, 45-year-old Michael Collins, in the head and arm, police said. Collins had parked his van in the home's driveway and tried to drive away but crashed a couple hundred feet away in an orange grove, they added.
Officers apprehended Collins, who was airlifted to Lakeland Regional Hospital for treatment for his injuries. He is expected to recover.
The point being that if you're going to go into a gunfight, bring enough gun. And what exactly is enough? In this case, .380 Auto happened to work as required. A head shot didn't kill the goblin, but it did drive home the fact that he picked the wrong house to burgle.
Now, coming from the guy who carries a 10mm (all the fun of 20mm but with half the recoil!), it might sound a little silly of me to say that in this case the .380 was adequate, but it clearly was. You see, nobody really wants to get shot. If I'm confronted with two perps wearing shirts that say "I'm going to shoot you with my X caliber handgun", the guy with the .380 gets shot last as .380 is more survivable than larger rounds. That doesn't, however, negate the fact that I don't want to get shot at all. Pain hurts!
Crooks and thugs are the same. They don't want to get shot at all. While a piddly caliber has less of a chance of a lethal hit, it's not a 0% chance and dying can really put a serious crimp in one's gangsta lifestyle. Collins, here, has first hand experience in exactly how bad a 9.652mm dent in the noggin can be.
Me? I'm going to pull out the AR-15 in a home invasion situation. Better aim, more chance of stopping the goblin(s) with fewer shots (I can only imagine how loud that damned thing would be in a closed room with no hearing protection). But in a pinch, even my Ruger Mark III 22/45 would work as some gun is better than no gun.
Now, I take a slight tangent – This pisses me off
Collins is charged with first-degree felony armed burglary and possession of burglary tools.
Dude had a crowbar. Now, according to the Brady's, just having an object makes you a dangerous person, so in Brady speak that makes sense, but I carried around a crowbar in the Jeep for years and never burgled a house, so I don't understand the need to assign intent to inanimate objects.
I assume the police do it so that they can try to make something, anything stick to a case, but that's just ridiculous.