I'm glad there's no way I can be a single mother. I know it's 2024 and that's supposedly a thing I could feasibly do now, but that ain't happening if you know what I mean.

While I know a lot of strong, capable women who can do plenty on their own, the truth is that a woman alone is always going to be at least somewhat more vulnerable than a man on his own. Add in a baby and now you've got a different sort of thing.

But then again, Rudyard Kipling noted, "The female of the species is more deadly than the male."

A few bad guys in Illinois found that out the hard way.

WAND News has learned new details about a home invasion that left a mother-of-two shot in Decatur.

Alexia Templar was woken up to the sound of shattering glass and footsteps inside her home on the city's east side near Hill Park around 4 a.m. Monday. She was home alone with her two young children when she saw two people standing inside. 

She gathered her children and told the intruders to leave or she would shoot them. According to Templar, they started immediately shooting at her. She shot back, but was hit once in the arm and once in the hip. According to a sworn statement from the Decatur Police Department, this was the same hip she was using to hold her infant daughter.

After the intruders left, her boyfriend arrived and she was taken to the hospital. Neither bullet did serious damage, Templar said.

...

Later that morning, officers were dispatched to a home for a report of a man having been shot. The man, 24-year-old Deonte A. Stone, was later interviewed at the hospital by a detective.

Stone was charged with home invasion. His two compatriots--25-year-old Colton L. Clark and an unnamed 16-year-old--were charged with attempted murder.

I'm a little surprised they released the name of the armed citizen because that tends to not happen in defensive gun use cases. I hope there are reasons it wasn't considered a problem in this instance.

Still, I'm glad Templar--and that's the most badass last name for an armed citizen story ever--had a firearm and the will to use it. Then again, when you find yourself on a two-way range, I'd imagine the will to pull the trigger comes a bit easier.

She was able to protect herself and her child, and that was most definitely needed. It appears she wasn't charged in the shooting, which is good. It shouldn't have been a concern, but this is Illinois and they're not exactly a Castle Doctrine state.

Look, this is why gun rights matter.

These guys were interested in blasting away from the jump. They didn't immediately flee when told they were confronting an armed citizen. They wanted to kill and had the means to do so despite the state's restrictive gun control laws.

But Templar had a firearm of her own and fought back.

I don't even want to imagine what would have happened if she hadn't. I doubt very much she'd have survived the encounter, but I fear murder wouldn't have been the worst thing to have happened to her that night.

Instead, she's nursing some wounds and the three scumbags are facing prison sentences.

The only thing that would have made this story better was if the three were facing funerals instead.