We often say the first rule of a gun fight is to have a gun.

We also often hear people claim that you shouldn’t have a gun because someone might shoot you with it.

The first is generally true and the second is rarely accurate. Yet an Indiana man is the rare exception to both of them.

It seems that a home invader came into his house armed. The home invader ended up in the morgue.

In Indianapolis homeowner says he shot and killed a home invader with his gun during a dramatic struggle.

Brent Smith told WRTV-TV that he had just returned home from the grocery store when a young man pulled a ski mask over his face, walked up to the house, and attacked him.

“He hit me in the head with his gun,” Smith told the station. “I yelled out ‘he is robbing me’, thinking my neighbors would hear me.”

They began to wrestle over the intruder’s weapon inside the home. At one point, the pair reportedly crashed through a glass table.

“It was like a movie, me and him wrestling over the gun,” Smith told WXIN-TV.

At one point in the struggle, he says he shot the intruder with his gun.

The bad guy took off, leaving the house and meeting up with some accomplices. However, the damage was done and he later died.

I’m glad Smith made it through the incident. I’m not going to shed a single tear for the dead home invader.

But Smith got lucky.

This is the kind of thing you see in movies. Two guys wrestling, one of them armed, only for the gun to go off and kill the guy who had the gun in the first place? That’s Hollywood stuff. That’s not something you can trust to happen in the real world.

Yet, in Smith’s case, it did. I’m glad it did.

But there will undoubtedly be someone out there who tries to make the case that this can be the norm or that it’s evidence you don’t need a firearm of your own to protect yourself. Someone will say it’s evidence that having a gun puts you more at risk of getting shot.

All of that is nonsense.

What we had here was a bad guy with a gun who was probably a bit hesitant, to say the least, to shoot anyone, which meant Smith–who still had ample reason to believe his life was in danger regardless of what the bad guy was thinking–could get in a position to fight back despite being unarmed.

In a lot of cases, fighting back is a better option than just waiting to be a victim, but a better way to fight back is to have a firearm of your own instead of hoping you can just shoot the bad guy with his.

Indiana is a pretty pro-gun state, so unless there’s some reason that Smith is prohibited from owning a firearm, he’d have been in better shape if he’d had one.

That’s true outside of Indiana as well, though some states are kind of stupid about people having firearms. They can’t actually stop most people from getting a gun, but they’re trying to make it as much of a pain as they can.

Indiana isn’t one of them, though, so there really isn’t a visible excuse.

Who knows, though. Maybe Smith is going to arm himself so he doesn’t have to trust good luck again.