A 24-year-old from Poplar Bluff, Missouri is due in court today to face charges in connection with an attempted burglary over the weekend that was thwarted by an armed homeowner. 

Rondriguez Hopkins was eventually taken to jail for the attempted break-in, but not before taking a trip to the hospital to deal with the injuries he received from the alert homeowner who was ready and able to defend herself.

According to Poplar Bluff police, they responded to a home in the 600 block of Victor Street around 5:50 a.m. on Saturday, October 12 for a report of a shooting.

They say a resident of the home told them she shot at a man as he entered her bedroom window. 

Officers found the man, later identified as Hopkins, who had a gunshot wound to his shoulder and hand. He was taken to a Poplar Bluff hospital for treatment and then transferred to a Cape Girardeau hospital.

KFVS-TV reports that Hopkins has had at least one prior run-in with the law, with court documents showing Hopkins was caught on camera while trying to break into multiple homes in the Poplar Bluff area just two years ago. It’s unclear whether Hopkins was ever convicted or pled guilty to any of those crimes, but if he was adjudicated, he didn’t receive much of a sentence since he was already back on the streets. 

The Poplar Bluff police say the woman isn’t facing any charges for her actions, which is the right decision. She was fast asleep in her own home when Hopkins allegedly decided to crawl in through her bedroom window. Missouri law does have a duty to retreat standard in some public settings, but the state also has enshrined the Castle Doctrine into law, which allows homeowners to use deadly force to protect themselves if they reasonably believe that their life is being threatened. 

If someone’s climbing through your bedroom window in the pre-dawn hours, it’s a safe bet they’re not there to drop off an Amazon package or make a GrubHub delivery. We don’t know what the would-be intruder had planned once he got inside the home, but it’s reasonable for the homeowner to suspect that her life was in danger when she saw a man climbing through her bedroom window. 

Thankfully, Missouri doesn’t have a gun storage law that would have required the armed citizen to keep her gun locked up with ammunition stored separately. Instead, the state has made it a crime to knowingly sell, lease, or give a gun to a minor without the express consent of their parent or guardian; an approach that leaves gun owners free to decide for themselves how best to keep their firearms safely stored at home instead of imposing a one-size-fits-all mandate that can put people at risk of being unable to access their self-defense firearm when its needed. 

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, wants a federal “safe storage” law, though as with most of her gun control policies, her campaign has been silent on the specifics of her proposal, including whether she still believes, as she stated in 2007, that “just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs.” 

If Harris had her way, the armed citizen who protected her life with a gun might very well have been left fumbling to get to her pistol while the intruder forced himself inside her bedroom. We all want to make sure that kids don’t get ahold of a gun, but Harris and her allies in the gun control lobby want to take away your choice when it comes to gun storage and adopt a standard that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to defend your life in the face of serious threats.