This chap is not looking for jewelry, a television, or even money. When she heard him breaking into the door, she grabbed her kids, her phone . . . and her .38 cal. revolver (that last is important, Best Beloved), and headed not to a bedroom, or to a closet, or to a bathroom, but all the way up into the attic. The perp follows them up. He’s actually hunting them inside their own house. He found what he was looking for and got it, good and hard. He pops open the door and instead of staring down at a helpless victim he’s staring down the business end of a firearm.
The woman empties her revolver (and that’s important, Best Beloved) and hits him with five of the shots, all in places potentially deadly. She punctures his lungs, his liver, and his stomach.
And this, Best Beloved, is where the revolver becomes important. Her revolver had only six shots. Six shots and she’s out of bullets. Even if she had a speed loader it would take her several seconds to swing out the cylinder and re-load. Several seconds in which a perp who’s still functional could overpower her, render her unconscious or otherwise unable to act in further protection of herself or her children. Several seconds in which a perp who’s himself armed but hasn’t deployed yet could get to his gun and use it.
The woman was counting her shots. The perp wasn’t. He was on the floor, begging her to stop shooting. He didn’t realize that she was done shooting for that day. She ran from the house with her children to a neighbor’s.
What did this perp do, with five bullets in him? He was able to rise from the floor, get all the way downstairs, out of the house and into his car, start the car, and drive off. He lost it a short distance away and wrecked in some woods. But what with adrenaline or whatever else he had in him he was still able to do all that . . . with five bullets in his body, any of which might have proven fatal.
And all this played out before the police ever got to the scene. The one mistake she made was to call her husband and have him call 911 rather than do it directly. So she introduced maybe, what? 30 seconds’ delay into it.
If she’d had something with, say, a 13-round magazine, she could have pumped double the number of rounds into him, and would have had some room to put one or more through his head. If she’d run out it would have taken two seconds, max, to drop one magazine and load another, and be back up and firing. Or what if the perp had had company with him? With her low-capacity weapon she’s got two moving targets and six shots to allocate between them. With one of them awful “high-capacity” magazines she might have stood a chance.
So remember, when Congress sets out to ban “high-capacity magazines,” what they’re really saying is that people like this woman only get X chances to save their and their families’ lives, and if that turns out to be insufficient . . . well, they’re just the broken eggs we’ve got to accept in making our omelette of unarmed paradise.