The right to keep and bear arms is generally held to be talking about things like guns. In fairness, those are the things most people are trying to ban and the things best suited for self-defense.

However, while on a livestream that was also going out over the radio, one of the listeners asked if I thought arms meant just firearms. No, I replied, it didn’t. The phrase “arms” includes pretty much any weapon, and in the time of the Founding Fathers, that included swords.

Most people don’t own them or know how to use them, but they’re just as covered by the Second Amendment as firearms.

Luckily, we don’t have a lot of sword control here in the US, and that worked out well for one Seattle homeowner.

A 71-year-old Seattle homeowner used a samurai sword to defend himself against a pitchfork-wielding burglar who had broken into his house over the weekend, authorities said.

Officers responded around 1:30 p.m. Sunday to a report of a residential burglary in the 2100 block of Beacon Avenue South and detained two men, Seattle police said.

The victim, still holding a samurai sword, had visible injuries, while the other man had a stab wound to his torso, according to police.

The bloodied victim can be heard on officer-worn bodycam video obtained by FOX13 Seattle telling police his house had been burglarized.

“He was inside my house, and he attacked me with a pitchfork,” the victim, whose name was not released, said of the suspect. “I grabbed the samurai sword and defended myself with the samurai sword.”

The “samurai sword” looks to be a katana–yes, there are others. No, I’m not going to list them all, nor do I know them all–so that’s what I put in the headline.

Anyway, this is just bizarre, to say the least.

Some will argue that he should have had a gun because that’s the best option for self-defense. You shouldn’t.

You see, he did have a firearm and that was Plan A. Unfortunately, the firearm jammed and he had to improvise. That apparently meant reaching for a sword.

Since the bad guy was using a pitchfork, that wasn’t the worst option available, to say the least.

Again, this is a weird story, but it’s not that hard to imagine happening. A lot of people don’t maintain their firearms or shoot them regularly so they can know of potential malfunctions in a safe, controlled environment, so they end up finding out at the wrong time that their gun has an issue.

Or it’s possible that in the struggle with the attacker, something happened to make a perfectly maintained firearm unable to fire–and it’s just being reported as a jam when that’s not accurate.

We don’t know.

What I do know is that the homeowner refused to give up and grabbed another weapon and used it in self-defense.

I’m a sword guy. I actually study and teach how to fight with swords. They’re not my first choice for self-defense. Trusting your life to one in this day and age is something I’d generally argue is stupid. Yet, as they say, if it’s stupid and it works, it ain’t stupid.

And, to be fair to the homeowner, it’s pretty clear he wasn’t planning on using a sword for self-defense in the first place. He just did what he had to do and improvised. I respect the hell out of that.