Get a handgun, save a life

With one swift slash from a samurai sword, John Pontolillo made a convincing case for ... private ownership of handguns?

Pontolillo is an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University. Before Sept. 15, that's all he was...

But nine days ago, Pontolillo went from being a simple college guy to being in the center of the maelstrom that developed after he slashed a burglar in the backyard of a house he shared with fellow JHU students.

Pontolillo used a samurai sword to defend himself after the burglar lunged at him. With one swish he nearly severed the burglar's left hand and pierced his chest. The man bled to death before paramedics could arrive.

The alleged burglar - and I'm using that word "alleged" guardedly here - was a career criminal with more than 20 arrests to his credit, based on what I was able to learn from the Web site www.courts.state.md...

He'd only been out of prison three days when he met his tragic but predictable end in that backyard. Rice sounds much like the character Vernon Johns notoriously eulogized. (Johns was the immediate predecessor of Martin Luther King Jr. at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.)

The deceased was, like Rice, a career miscreant. Those expecting a sympathetic eulogy didn't know Johns very well.

"He lived a trifling and useless life," Johns said. "He walked around Montgomery daring someone to slit his throat. Last week somebody obliged him. He lived like a dog; he died like a dog. Undertaker, claim the body."

Rice seemed cut from the same cloth, which may be why some in the Baltimore area cheered his death. But, inevitably, some cast him as a victim too...

Like that Rev. Johns' eulogy...from a time when there were those willing to speak the truth. Good article, worth reading all the way through.

I have a license to carry a weapon in Texas. A crazy man pulled a sword on me as I was walking home late one night on the road that I have lived on for forty five years. He learned the hard way that you don’t bring a sword to a gun fight. I didn’t shoot him...just humiliated him until the police arrived. HA!

2 posted on 09/23/2009 9:15:54 PM PDT by jy8z (From the next to last exit before the end of the internet.)

Good shoot, er... uh, slay? Just what do you call it when someone gets sliced and diced with a Katana? I mean, besides “dead”.

After seeing these used on shows like “Mythbusters” and “Deadliest Warrior”, I have a LOT More respect for these effective implements of war.

3 posted on 09/23/2009 10:25:14 PM PDT by Freedom_Is_Not_Free (Depression Countdown: 50... 49... 48...)

Would he really preferred to have a gun? For the rest of his life he’ll be known as ‘the Samurai sword dude.’

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