Serial felon Willie Franklin Stith III must have been laying in wait for the female victim to return to her apartment home from work last night around 11:00 PM in Wilmington, NC.

He forced her inside, tied her up, and you can guess what he might have had in store for her next.

She, however, had other plans.

Police say a woman shot and killed a man who broke into her home Monday night and tied her up.

Willie Franklin Stith, III, 35, was killed in the reported home invasion in the 5000 block of Hunt Club Road, off New Centre Drive, according to Wilmington Police Department spokeswoman Linda Rawley. In a news release, Rawley wrote that a woman got home from work around 11 p.m. Monday when Stith forced her inside, beat her and bound her.

The woman was able to free herself and retrieved her gun, shooting Stith once. Rawley wrote that police found Stith near the front door of the home. No charges have been filed in the incident.

Records from the N.C. Department Of Public Safety show Stith racked up more than a dozen convictions between 1998 and 2002 in New Hanover and Cumberland counties, including second-degree burglary, possession of stolen goods, larceny, breaking and entering vehicles and assault on a public official.

Stith was featured in a 2008 StarNews story about local authorities using federal sentencing guidelines to keep armed offenders off the streets. After police searched Stith’s home in 2003 and found heroin, a pistol and a shotgun, Stith pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.

Stith only served 39 months of his 10 year sentence, and was released in September of 2006.

He may not have been able to keep himself out of trouble for the past decade, but the serial felon with a record of gun crimes at least avoided any arrests and convictions.

Last night, his life of violent crime came to an end, permanently.

This killing of a serial felon by an armed citizen who fought back will be ignored by Michael Bloomberg’s dour little gun grabbers, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, the Brady Campaign, and other groups who are rabidly anti-self defense.

Sadly, it will also be ignored by self-styled “experts” in law enforcement (especially politicized police leaders in urban areas who have anti-gun Democrats as their bosses), and government officials, who typically tell people to never resist violent crime, on the theory that compliance will increase your odds of surviving an encounter with a violent criminal.

But what does the data suggest?

Only 26% of violent crime is committed by a criminal armed with a weapon. Of those armed with a gun, about 30% are unloaded, and another 10%-15% are fake. According to the data collected by the author’s department, another 13% of guns were non-functional, with the guns being broken, having the wrong ammunition, or the wrong magazines.

That’s almost 60% of the guns used in crime, folks.

While every circumstance is different and there are far too many variables involving the capabilities of the criminal(s) and intended victims, the specific circumstances, and the perceptions of those involved, it is seems clear that if only 26% of violent criminals are armed, and roughly 60% of those are armed with guns that are either fake, broken, or unloaded, that fighting back is by far your best option, especially if things appear dire and the threat of sexual assault or physical violence are high.

We don’t yet know if Stith’s gun was real or fake, loaded or unloaded, or functional or non-functional. What we do know is that his female victim fought back, got free, obtained her own very real, loaded, and functional firearm, and “solved the problem.”

From our earliest days, society incorrectly teaches us that violence is wrong.

Violence is not always wrong. Violence is only a tool. It can be used for great evil, but it can also be used for great good and to save lives.

There are indeed times in our lives where the tool of violence is precisely and unreservedly the correct response, as it was last night when serial felon Willie Franklin Stith III emerged from the darkness to force a woman into her home at gun point and tied her up with ill intent.

As Tim Larkin points out in the video above, sometimes violence is precisely the correct solution to the problem, but you have to understand when it is the correct solution. Knowing when, why, and how to apply violence to solve a problem only comes through good training from competent instructors.

It’s not “common sense” as our now-fired Waffle House waitress found out yesterday, and you’re not going to “rise to the occasion.” You’re going to default to your level of training.

Put in the context of software, you’re going to try to access the correct program for the problem at hand. If you don’t have the right software to access, you’re going to have to make due with what you have, and that’s not typically going to provide you with a good outcome.

The First Person Defender force-on-force scenarios we’ve looked at over the past few months have demonstrated time and again. Those without training make poor choices on the fly. They either don’t shoot when they need to shoot and good people get injured, or they shoot too soon, or shoot too many people and/or the wrong people. Those people with the most training do far better, even when facing more complex situations from compromised positions.

Get armed. Get trained. Go forth in confidence, and live without fear.