Hartford Homeowner Doesn’t Wait For Police, Shoots Home Intruder

HARTFORD, ALABAMA — A homeowner shot and injured a man trying to crawl in through his window. When the homeowner realized, at around 11:30 p.m., that there was a man who wasn’t about to take ‘no’ for an answer, he used his home defense handgun to put a bullet in his chest. When police arrived, they arrested the suspect after he got treatment at a nearby hospital.

Chances are good, from the sounds of it, that the bullet probably missed any truly vital organs. It’s a reminder that center mass has plenty of room for error. However, without medical treatment, sucking chest wounds can and will get bad quickly.

What’s cool about this story is that the Hartford Police Chief came out and publicly supported the homeowner.

“It was an attempted home invasion and the home owner shot the suspect,” Hartford Police Chief Annie Ward said to the Dothan Eagle. “I want the citizens of Hartford to know if they feel like their life or their family’s lives are in danger then they have the right to protect themselves.”

It’s always awesome to see local police chiefs standing up for their own citizens. People pay taxes to fund their own municipal police programs and it’s generally understood that it can take minutes for police to arrive in an actual emergency. While other police chiefs from more restrictive counties may denounce home defense, saying that it would be better to wait for police rather than take matters into their own hands, the realistic view is that it’s just not always possible to do so.

Notifying police is important. Waiting for them to handle the situation could be fatal.

Defending one’s home is a high stress situation in the first place. Not only is a homeowner worried about himself, he’s worried what will happen to him if he should fail. We have NO idea who is coming in through that window. It could be some idiot who is in way over his head or it could be someone extremely violent, who has absolutely no reservations about doing horrible things.

Thankfully, in the majority of cases we report on for home invasions, it’s usually just an idiot who is in way over his head. However, without a gun and left to the mercy of that idiot — how much mercy can we reasonably expect? That’s an answer no armed homeowner wants to put to the test. At least the police chief gets that.