Many people don’t like guns and will avoid them if the can. Others feel strongly that firearms don’t belong in the hands of private citizens at all. In my younger days, I didn’t feel strongly either way. However, if I had been forced to take a side, I would probably have agreed with those who sought tougher gun control laws. After all, my father was a cop. If it meant he would never have to face an armed criminal, how could I not have supported limiting the number of guns on the streets? My opinion was radically changed on the issue and forever set in stone one night when a shotgun I couldn’t afford, and a pane of glass were all that stood between my young wife and a horrible, life-destroying experience. That was the night a police officer pulled me aside and said to me, “Mr. Ellis, burglars don’t cut phone lines.”

The True Story

Blue lights splashed the front of my cheaply rented duplex and the fronts of all the dilapidated houses up Jefferson Avenue and across the side street, Winona. I just sat there on the front porch steps, shivering in the cool night air next to my wife. Both of us gazed blankly at the two police cruisers parked in front of our home, our shattered sanctuary, and watched the black uniformed police mill about. I saw another cruiser pass slowly down Winona and turn into the alley behind the house. Several officer’s came around that side of the house with grim expressions painted on their blue-lit faces and were talking in hushed tones. Finally, one gestured for me to come with them. I got up and strolled a few paces out from the porch to join the officers. They apparently wished to get me out of my wife’s earshot. The shorter of the two officers, an aged veteran by the looks of him, spoke and asked, “You don’t know anybody who’d want to harm you or your wife?”

“No, nobody,” I said. Other officers had already asked me that several times in the last half hour.

That’s when he said it. “We don’t want to alarm you, Mr. Ellis…” He called me, a twenty-year-old kid, “Mr. Ellis.” That would have been funny under different circumstances. “…but burglars don’t cut phone lines. Do you understand what I’m saying? This man was after your wife.”

I knew that, or I thought I did. But hearing it ring so clearly from these seasoned police officer’s lips was still stunning. My wife had come within inches of being raped, murdered, or both. Her life could have ended, or our lives together could have been scarred forever – but for a shotgun most people would have said I never should have bought. Though it was the farthest thing from my mind at the time, years later I realize that this turned out to be the happiest possible ending to this terrifying experience we could have asked for. And this ending could only have come about by our owning a gun.

The whole episode really began lying in bed the first Friday night we moved in together in our own place. We rented the only place we could afford, a trailer just over the Anderson Country line in one of the seediest trailer parts in the world. Twilight Zone Trailer Park. That Friday evening, since before the sun went down, there had been a loud party going on just down Jupiter Drive. By midnight, it must have been ever bit a wild-west scene, although I admit I was afraid to even look out the window. Loud music, drunken shouts, beer bottles busting in the street, and the occasional gunfire into the air deprived me and my young bride of any hope of sleep. This was the kind of place that (I knew later because my father told me), that if you called the cops, and if you were lucky enough to have a cop within 10 miles of the place, they wouldn’t come in without backup hot on their heels. In other words, you had little expectation of a police response less than 30 minutes to an hour. Lying there together in the dark in more-or-less frightened silence, I finally spoke out of the dark, “We need a gun. More to the point, you need a gun for when I have the late shift. I can’t have you here by yourself, defenseless.”

“We can’t afford a gun,” she said. “And besides, I wouldn’t know how to use it.”

“Tomorrow we’re buying a gun, and I’ll show you how to use it,” I replied.

She asked, “How?”

“I don’t know how, but it’s done,” I said. As if to drive home my point, another shout and beer bottle shattered in the street just then.

The next day we took money from bills that would just have to float unpaid to K-mart and purchased a 12-guage gauge Remington shotgun and several boxes of shells. We ventured into a patch of woods I knew and shot cardboard from the boxes we had used to move into the trailer. Within a couple of hours, my sweet, meek, little sparrow of a wife could handle the weapon safely and blow the crotch out of any silhouette I marked on the cardboard. It didn’t seem to matter where she aimed, that’s where all the buckshot went. It was accurate enough to do the job, and that’s all I cared about. I understood enough to know that the big shotgun was less than ideal for home defense, but I also figured that almost no assailant would be insane enough to try to face it down. It didn’t matter either way because that shotgun was literally all we could possibly afford.

Blessedly, the shotgun remained loaded and with the safety on, but untouched otherwise, within one step of our bed for the better part of a year before it’s importance would truly be realized. In that time, the need to cut expenses even more drove us to rent a duplex closer to our jobs and for less money. As much below a normal family trailer park as Twilight Zone was, our neighborhood just three blocks off Magnolia Avenue was that much below a normal family suburban neighborhood.

That fateful night, the night the officer told me burglars don’t cut phone lines, I worked past midnight at my warehouse job. I was supposed to work even later, but I managed to get picked by the boss to go home early. AS it turned out, it was not early enough by only a few minutes. I pulled into the drive at half past twelve to find my young wife standing on the front porch crying her eyes out and holding our shotgun. I rushed from my beat-up car to the porch and asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Somebody tried to break in on me,” she wept.

“When?” I asked, as I stepped up and relieved her of the weapon. I don’t think I really gave her story much credence right away. I thought perhaps she might have spooked herself. Still, she seemed pretty shook up, so we went back inside, and I went for the phone to call the police.

“Just now, she said. “…just a few minutes ago.”

I reached the phone, picked it up and put the receiver to my ear. I heard only silence. I tapped the knobs in the receiver cradle several times and listened again – nothing.  I stood there in stunned amazement for several long seconds, and then dropped the handset back onto the phone. I began thinking, “…what are the odds? Can this really be happening?”

My wife looked at me and said, “What?”

After a quick debate with myself as to whether to tell her, I finally said, “Uh…The phone’s dead.” The same puzzled look I must have had on my face drifted across hers like a gathering storm. In moments, the reality of what this meant would dawn.

I quickly went to the kitchen to dig a flashlight out of the junk drawer. We went out the front together, and I sent her across the small yard to the neighbor’s house to call the police from there.  I went down the side yard between our houses with shotgun and flashlight in hand. I pointed the light at the phone line stapled neatly in a long run along the side of the house and walked towards the back. Almost under our bedroom window, I saw it. The wire had been pulled away from the house into a little loop and cut cleanly with a knife.

He had a knife. My heart sank.

I continued around the duplex to find the storm door on the back propped wide open. This was the door into our kitchen. We knew our neighborhood was not great, so we were fastidious about keeping that storm door shut and locked. I stepped around the storm door to see what was going on, and around the door handle and lock, huge chunks of wood had been whittled away from the jam. Any powerful blow to the door, I believe, would have sent it flying open at that point. This monster couldn’t have been more than a few seconds from gaining entry to our home if he wanted to, but he clearly wanted to enter silently to attack his prey. For a moment, my head swam. A part of me grasped desperately at the mental straws trying to figure out any way I could to just discount this whole thing as nothing more than a case of the jitters. The physical evidence all around me simply denied me that possibility. I started to shake, and my fear began to merge with a rising tide of anger. I managed to control myself, however and started back around the house. Before I did though, I realized how anyone could see right into our kitchen with our sheer curtains.

My wife met me at the front of the house. She said, “I had a time getting them to come to the door, but the police are on their way. Did you find anything?”

I changed the subject, “Okay, tell me exactly what happened,” as we went back inside. She recounted through the fresh tears how she had been sitting in the living room watching TV, and just finishing folding a load of laundry. The house was well-lit and bustling. She said she got a strange feeling of discomfort, and she swears she heard a clear voice in her head tell her to turn off the TV and get ready for bed. She obeyed it. She had turned off the TV and was in the bedroom getting ready to lay down when she heard a noise outside the window. The laundry machines had just stopped, and the house had gotten quiet. Even with the house quieting down, she was in the only room in the house where she could have heard the guy cut the phone line. She didn’t know what it was at the time. She described it like a brushing sound against the house. She told me that same strange voice told her to dig the shotgun out of the closet – just in case.

She fetched the shotgun and decided to double check the doors, beginning with the kitchen. She stepped into the kitchen a popped on the light. Our back door was one of those half-glass doors where the lower part was wood, and the upper part was panes of glass. There in the pane of glass just above the handle, though the sheer white curtains, she saw the would-be intruder’s face. She told me the young, black, male saw her too. He looked straight at her face, and then straight down to that huge 12-gauge in her hands. I guess he though (pardon the expression) his knife wasn’t going to cut it. He turned tail and ran down the back yard and down the alley. Less than five minutes later, I pulled into the driveway.

About 10 minutes after she told me, I listened as she recounted the story to the police. I’ll never forget, one of the cops before they began to pull out told me, “Next time, shoot him through the door.” He was dead serious.

The Lesson

I’ve recounted this story perhaps 50 or more times over the 35 years or so since it happened. I’ve ruminated all those years on the events that night. I’ve searched for some flaw in my own reasoning, and I can come to no good and certain conclusion that does not end in disaster if the gun is removed from the equation. Neither I nor anyone else I’ve ever told the story to have come up with an alternative way of handling the situation that offered a more confident hope of a positive outcome than having my wife be able to protect herself simply and absolutely.

One very liberal young woman wanted to argue once that it was the light that scared him away, not the gun. However, he clearly knew she was awake inside. He could hear the TV and laundry machines. Most of the lights in the house were on anyway. Furthermore, my wife clearly recollects that he delayed a long time after the kitchen light went on. And she saw him look at the gun. It makes sense. He knew she couldn’t call the police, and if he busted on in, she would waste time trying the phone which wouldn’t work. He obviously knew he was armed. He was just about to the point that shouldering the door one good time would throw it open. I am not convinced that anything BUT the gun could have inspired him to flee. The woman who argued the light theory did what almost all die hard liberal gun control nuts do, she stormed off in a huff.

From others, numerous times I’ve heard, “Well, I still just feel like people should not have guns,” as they walk away. As if that’s a reasoned or even sane way to decide anything.

The most common alternative to owning guns offered by most supporters of tougher gun control laws is, call the police and wait for help. Obviously, that was not an acceptable alternative in this scenario. This happened in 1987, before almost anybody had cell phones. The fact is, if she had only the phone as an option, and she had picked it up to find it silent as I did, she might have lost all her composure right then and there. Even if the phone had worked, there was zero chance then (and now) that the police will arrive in time to do anything other than work the scene of yet another tragedy.

No, without the shotgun, the intruder’s first choice would have been to bust in. Whether the would-be rapist knew it or not, my wife would not have fled the home. She would not have left our infant son behind to an unknown fate, and she would obviously not have had time to gather him up before running. There can be no debate. The voice of God and our shotgun save her life.

If the world had no guns – if firearms had never been invented at all – my wife would have suffered the attack and been brutalized to whatever degree, the predator fancied. If my wife had been armed with a baseball bat, a knife, or even a sword or spear, she would still have been at a disadvantage to the larger more powerful male. Only the firearm in the history of weapons made her a match – better than a match in fact – against her would-be attacker. In the end, that is what guns provide in circumstances such as this – equality at a minimum. After all, those born stronger, faster, with the predatory nature have always been able to attack, oppress, victimize, maim, and kill the weaker, slower, or gentler people in our society, with or without a weapon of any kind. Only the firearm offers a petite female not only equality but superiority to one (or more) large males.

Some people’s mind rush to non-lethal weapons or martial arts – which I know a bit about. The problem is that karate takes constant practice and exercise to be in shape enough to use it. Pepper Spray and stun guns work on some criminals some of the time. But they pale in comparison to a firearm. Interestingly, if a small woman and a large man both have guns, they are still essentially evenly matched in a confrontation. A gun trumps any of these lesser weapons, so if he is armed with a gun and she with pepper spray, he has a decided advantage.

I personally have no problem with background checks or something like mandatory training to own and carry a firearm. But I will never suffer more restrictions than exist today on what kinds of firearms I can own or magazine capacity. Granted, it was but a humble shotgun that saved my wife’s life, but I am well-schooled enough to know that a better weapon would have down a better job.

That shotgun that night became the only material thing in the world that had any value to me whatsoever. I would not then have traded it for a pile of diamonds. I still wouldn’t trade my right to keep and bear arms for a pile of diamonds today. Each time I recall or recount that story, my conviction grows stronger. To suggest the government should control my gun ownership to me is to suggest that the world would somehow be a better play if my wife had been raped or killed that night. No one will ever be able to convince me of that.