Two families experience possible intruders. One couple is prepared.

I will lovingly refer to the first couple as "Fancy Pants and Society Wife".
Fancy Pants is the treasurer for a large corporation. He drives a BMW and matches his belt with his Italian shoes, even when mowing his postage stamp lawn with his oversized tractor. Fancy Pants sails and smokes Panatellas.
Society Wife grew up at the country club. She is beautiful and always impeccably dressed. She drives a Land Rover and her home is spotless…mostly due to the fact that she does not like having company.
Fancy Pants and Society Wife are in the HOA. They place nasty-grams in mailboxes of neighbors who leave their garbage cans out longer than the allotted 24-hours period. They also threatened to sue a neighbor for installing a small garden without prior HOA approval.
One night, around 2 a.m., Society Wife heard noise coming from the basement. She promptly woke up Fancy Pants. They argued in bed for ten minutes trying to decide what to do because there was no weapon in the house, less the blue Maglite under the bed. Society Wife worried about the toddler waking to the noise or worse, being harmed by the potential intruder.
Fancy Pants finally agreed to go to the basement, but only if Society Wife went too. He was scared and unwilling to face potential danger alone. He grabbed the Maglite. Society Wife wanted to stay upstairs with the child but he demanded that she follow him down the stairs. So she did, tearfully, and empty-handed.
When they got to the main level of the home, they heard a male voice, possibly two, in the basement. Nearly paralyzed with fear, they scurried back upstairs to hide in the child’s room and call the police.
Twenty minutes later, the police arrived. Fancy Pants slithered down to the main floor and let the officers in. He explained what they had heard. The officers found it odd that two male intruders would talk loud enough to hear on the third floor. It was also peculiar that the couple didn’t hear the men enter on the main level nor was there evidence of a break in.
After hearing the voices for themselves, the officers took out their guns. They turned the basement lights on and headed down to find the couple’s tabby on an old couch watching Hatari!, the remote control neatly tucked under her fluffy gray tail. The officers were less than amused.
Fancy Pants and Society Wife had wasted precious time better allocated to true emergencies. The couple might have discovered the feline offender themselves with the help of a shotgun and a little chutzpah.
Couple number two, Mulder and Scully, also experienced a potentially violent situation.
One quiet fall Monday evening Mulder, Scully, and their exceedingly intelligent offspring were watching football. While heading to the kitchen to get more Two Hearted Ale and chicken wings, Scully passed a front window and noticed police lights on the street a block east and a block west of their home. Something else struck Scully as strange. It was 6:30 pm, still rush hour, yet there were no cars going either way on their otherwise well travelled road.
Scully interrupted Mulder’s celebration of a fifty-yard touchdown with news of the police cars outside. Seemingly concerned, Mulder lifted an eyebrow, opened the nearby safe and stuffed a piece into the back of his jeans before grabbing a jacket and heading down the street. At the road block Mulder learned that the male neighbor directly across the street was suicidal, under the influence, and holding his own mother hostage.
Mulder handed Scully her .380. He stood watch while Scully ushered the very obedient children into an interior upstairs room. Mulder double checked the doors and windows. Then he went downstairs and geared up for the very reason our founding fathers established the Second Amendment.
The male neighbor assaulted his elderly mother with a metal pipe. She somehow escaped and was taken to a shock trauma center. But the cops lost track of the angry suicidal drunk while the mom was being airlifted. Police believed the violent neighbor possessed a powerful rifle and was now hiding outside of Mulder and Scully’s home.
The road remained closed and the street lights, turned off. Mulder scanned his lawn from a window, spotting a team of sizable armed men with night vision goggles entering from the western property line. Mulder waited patiently inside, watching the SWAT team move through the gardens and disappear into the eastern woods.
Ten minutes later, there was a loud knock at the front door. Someone demanded it open. The unwelcome guests didn’t bother to say who they were. But Mulder had been watching them. The SWAT team leader ordered the interior and exterior lights off because they were interfering with the night vision. No further info was given.
This went on for two hours until the fugitive made his way back into his own house. Minutes later, two SWAT trucks pulled into Mulder and Scully’s driveway and unloaded. By now, it was 9 p.m.. Scully put another Veggie Tales movie on the Macbook and threw together a makeshift floor picnic for the children. They were hungry and had missed dinner. She did her best to keep the children calm but heard what sounded like an earthquake in the distance.
Thundering rotors shook the family’s home directly from above, spotlighting the house across the street. The cops were yelling through bullhorns. They had the man on the phone and were trying to talk him out of his weapon. Didn’t work, so the SWAT team launched a raid from Mulder and Scully’s front yard.
If Mulder and Scully didn’t practice the Second Amendment they would have been scared half to death. But they were calm and collected as ever, watching intently as the SWAT team took the house across the street. It was over in ten minutes and the street became quiet again. The hopeless man had taken his own life. Two SWAT teams quickly filed back into black trucks and exited the driveway.
The couple was deeply saddened by the death of the neighbor. Mulder and Scully carefully paraphrased the evening’s events to the children, knowing gossip would be circulating at school the following day. They settled their precious ones into bed then shared a deep exhale, truly thankful that no shots had entered their home. Moreover, they were relieved not to have been forced to protect their children.
After the story broke, liberals used the tragedy as reason to propose a sweeping gun ban. But there was no record of the neighbor’s rifle used to end his own life. Because violent folks will never register or relinquish their guns. Which is one of the primary reasons why law abiding citizens need to bear arms. The peaceful must have means to defend themselves and their families.