Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez says no charges are expected after a woman was forced to defend herself when her armed and estranged husband forcibly entered her home early Tuesday morning. As it turns out, he wasn’t the only one with a gun, and the woman opened fire as he was trying to force his way inside the residence.

Gonzalez said there had been several police reports made in the days leading up to the shooting about the situation. Early Tuesday morning, the man is accused of kicking in the back door to the home and trying to get inside. The sheriff said the man had a handgun during the incident.

The woman was detained at the scene and cooperated with law enforcement, according to Gonzalez. He said no charges are expected to be filed and the case will be presented to a grand jury.

There’s not a lot of information on this incident at the moment, so we don’t know what those earlier police reports were all about, but I’m glad that the woman in question was in a position to protect her life when her estranged husband was trying to kick in the door of her home while armed.

I mentioned this exact scenario when I spoke at the Virginia Citizens Defense League’s Lobby Day rally on Monday, just a few hours before the hypothetical situation I talked about played out in reality in Harris County. Two of the many gun control bills introduced in Richmond this year would impose varying waiting periods on firearm transfers, under the theory that a “cooling off” period might reduce the number of gun-involved suicides. Making people wait a few days to pick up their gun might give those with suicidal ideation time to rethink their plan and reach out for help, or at least that’s the theory. In reality, the RAND Corporation (not exactly a bastion of Second Amendment activism) has found that waiting periods may serve only to delay, not prevent, those terrible incidents.

Evidence from a cohort of handgun purchasers in California found that, although almost no firearm suicides were committed by this population during the state’s 15-day waiting period, the most elevated relative risk of firearm suicide (compared with the general population) occurred in the first week after receipt of the weapon and remained highly elevated during the first month of purchase (Wintemute et al., 1999). A more recent analysis of handgun owners in California found that the risk of firearm suicide was highest immediately following the end of the state’s ten-day waiting period (i.e., 11 to 30 days after the purchase application), but more than half of all firearm suicides among handgun owners occurred more than one year after the purchase application (Studdert et al., 2020). Moreover, most firearms are purchased by individuals who already own a firearm. Azrael et al. (2017) found that, on average, gun owners had close to five firearms each, and a large majority (62 percent) purchased their most recent weapon from a licensed gun dealer. For those who already own guns, a waiting period may have little or no effect on suicide risk.

As well-intended as waiting periods might be, supporters are ignoring the unintended consequences of these laws. Sheriff Gonzalez says that there had been multiple contacts with law enforcement in the days before the self-defense shooting took place. Imagine if the victim in this case wanted to purchase a firearm for her protection after the first incident, but was told that she had to twiddle her thumbs for five days or more before she could take possession of a lawfully purchased pistol. She would have been left utterly defenseless and unable to stop her estranged ex from smashing through her door or attacking her once he’d made his way inside.

There are plenty of people who choose to purchase a firearm for the very first time because they perceive an imminent threat to their life. Forcing them to wait until some arbitrary period of time has passed isn’t just unconstitutional. It’s unconscionable; putting them needlessly at risk just to satisfy the whims of the gun control crowd.