According to the Philadelphia police, the City of Brotherly Love saw major reductions in violent crime last year, with homicides down by 21% and non-fatal shootings down 28%; all without any new gun control legislation signed into law in Harrisburg. 

While the trend is good news, Philly is far from crime-free. Thankfully, anti-gunners haven't yet destroyed the ability of Philadelphia residents to exercise their Second Amendment rights, and one woman's embrace of her right to keep and bear arms likely saved her life early this morning.

A man is dead and another is injured after a woman arrived home to find two alleged intruders inside her West Philadelphia apartment early Friday morning.

The shooting happened on the 6200 block of Chestnut Street around 2 a.m.

Police say the woman, armed with a gun, got into a fight with one of the men before 13 shots were fired, killing that man in a bedroom.

While the second suspect was able to flee the apartment, a "person of interest" with a gunshot wound to the chest showed up at a local hospital not long after the attack took place. 

Thankfully, the woman didn't suffer any major injuries while fighting off the two strangers. According to NBC Philadelphia she remained on the scene and spoke to detectives, who say they still don't know why the men were inside her residence. 

This could have been a targeted attack on the woman, but given that she told authorities she didn't recognize either of the suspects my guess is that this was a crime of opportunity; likely a burglary that was interrupted when the armed citizen returned to her home in the early morning hours. 

It's also unclear at this point whether the woman had her gun on her when she walked inside or if she was able to retrieve it while she was fending off their assault. Regardless, I'm glad she had access to a firearm for her own defense, and it's a good thing that she had one of those dastardly "large capacity" magazines gun control activists are trying to ban. 

The gun control lobby likes to claim that there's no good reason for anyone to need a magazine that can hold more than ten rounds. They often point to research purporting to show that fewer than three rounds are fired in an "average" defensive gun use, even though U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez has thoroughly debunked that so-called study. 

Even if there was reason to believe that the 2.2 rounds per DGU statistic thrown around by the anti-gunners is anywhere close to accurate, there's no guarantee that any particular incident where a gun is used in self-defense is going to be "average". In this case multiple assailants were assaulting a single woman who needed to shoot until she stopped the threat against her life. Would three rounds have been enough? I highly doubt it. 

We don't get to choose the circumstances when our lives are threatened. We're responding to a threat to life and limb when we use our firearms in self-defense. We might have to face off against a single intruder or armed robber, but there's a very good chance we'll have to fend off multiple assailants, as this woman did. The fact that she had more than ten rounds available may very well have made the difference between police arriving at the scene of a self-defense shooting and them showing up to investigate the "average" murder of a woman in her own home.