Sixty-eight-year-old Joseph Sapienza did four years as a combat Marine in Vietnam, and has the eyes of a man who doesn’t scared easily.

When he heard someone attempting to break in to his home, Mr. Sapienza grabbed his walker, grabbed his .45, and he headed towards the door.

The two stunned robbers seemed stunned when he opened the door and promised to give them more trouble than they could handle.

Mr. Sapienza has a message waiting for them if they decide to try their luck again.

“(If) you try to break in my house again, I will be waiting on you,” reads the note, which was still there Friday afternoon. “Enter at your own risk.”

Sapienza, a Marine Corps veteran who served four years in Vietnam, was watching television in his bed at 7:42 p.m. at his home on Davis Avenue. He heard someone prying off the lock and pulling the nails to the latch out of his front door.

He grabbed his .45-caliber handgun, put it in a holster on his walker and began shuffling toward the sound. He flipped a hallway light on, yelled out to announce he was armed, and yanked open the door to see two men wearing ski masks.

They jumped off his porch and practically tripped over one another trying to flee, Sapienza said.

The combat vet has been disabled since 1980, when he was hit by a truck while he was riding a bike. He normally uses a motorized scooter to get around outside the home, and suspects that the robbers viewed him as an easy target because of his disability.

If I were them, I don’t think that I’d test Mr. Sapienza.

While his legs might not work as well as they once did, his heart and his trigger finger seem to work just fine.

This story resolved the same way that the majority of defensive gun uses end, which is with the good guy putting the bad guy(s) to flight with merely the presence of a firearm.

Guns are thought to be used between several hundred thousand and several million times each year in armed self-defense, and only rarely are shots fired.