Beto O’Rourke will never get the chance to take away the AR-15 kept in the home of Jeremy King of Lithia, Florida. King and his family are grateful for that and for the right to keep and bear arms enshrined, without any asterisk, in the Second Amendment of the Constitution that Democrats claim to be defending.

Yep, that AR-15, the very same “assault” weapon owned by bitter clingers said to endanger such families and the neighborhoods they live in. Instead, it saved his family from an intruder who broke into his house, pistol-whipped Mr. King, grabbed his 11-year-old daughter, and threatened to leave the King family another statistic buried deep in the news. As Spectrum News 9 tells the story:

The bruises and swelling on Jeremy King's face tells the story of a man on the receiving end of a brutal attack. But his actual account is far more harrowing than his injuries suggest… “I’ve got a fractured eye socket, a fractured sinus cavity, a concussion, 20 stitches and three staples in my head,” said King, outside his home on Old Welcome Road in Lithia… King said he was inside his home Wednesday when two masked men armed with guns barged in around 9:00pm… Both men pointed guns at King while demanding money. “They came in heavily hooded and masked. As soon as they had got the back door opened, they had a pistol on me and was grabbing my 11-year-old daughter,” he said. King said one of the men started pistol-whipping him while another kicked him repeatedly in the head. His wife, who is eight months pregnant, was in the back bedroom and peeked out to see what was going on. King said one of the men shot at her. She retreated, grabbed an AR-15 and returned fire. “When he came toward the back door in her line of sight, she clipped him,” King said. “He made it from my back door to roughly 200 feet out in the front ditch before the AR did its thing.”

Police later found one of the assailants dead in a nearby ditch. This is just one of the many cases that happen every day of armed citizens saving lives with firearms, unheralded by the media.

Stephen Willeford certainly can remind both the grieving and the self-righteous that guns in general and the AR-15 in particular, which has been misrepresented by gun control zealots as an "assault rifle," can be used by good guys to save lives as well as by bad guys to take them. He is the hero of Sutherland Springs, Texas, who, hearing the sound of gunfire at a nearby church, grabbed the AR-15 he had taught others to use as an NRA instructor and chased down the mass murderer who had shot up the First Baptist Church before he could continue his murder spree elsewhere:

The hero who last November stopped the gunman behind the deadly Texas church massacre said using an AR-15 enabled him to end the bloodshed. In an emotional interview with CRTV's "Louder With Crowder" on Monday, Stephen Willeford described the gunfight and dramatic car chase that ensued to stop the shooter from slaughtering additional churchgoers. The former National Rifle Association instructor was home Sunday morning when his daughter told Willeford she had heard gunshots from the nearby Baptist church, prompting him to get his AR-15 rifle from his safe and load a magazine. He ran to the church and confronted the alleged shooter, Devin Patrick Kelley, who fired shots at Willeford. While taking cover behind a pickup truck, Willeford fired several shots at the gunman, who sped away in his car. Willeford ran to a truck stopped at a stop sign and asked the driver to help him to stop Kelley, who had a history of domestic violence and had been kicked out of the military. The two men pursued the gunman, whom [sic] officials say wore tactical gear and a bullet-proof vest, down a nearby highway until the vehicle eventually careened off the side of the road. When police arrived, Kelley was found dead on the scene with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head as well as two other gunshot wounds – one on his leg and one on his torso.

The response time for a bullet from an AR-15 fired in self-defense is a lot quicker than calling 911. Other non-scary weapons are just as lethal and the AR-15 has been chosen by popular demanded as the defensive weapon of choice, despite an earlier nonsensical ruling by another federal judge:

As the Ferguson riots raged, U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Blake, appointed by President Clinton, issued a ruling that upheld the Maryland law, saying, "the court seriously doubts that the banned assault long guns are commonly possessed for lawful purposes... and is inclined to find the weapons fall outside Second Amendment protection as dangerous and unusual." Now the Second Amendment, written in the era of muskets, does not mention what arms we have the right to keep and bear. But we have an idea, based on how they were used: to protect their owners' homes, businesses, farms and families, and to fight the tyranny of the British crown. It's been said that the Second Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights to protect the other nine. Gun control advocates say, with some snarkiness, that the Second Amendment doesn't allow one to own nuclear weapons or tanks, so it's merely a question of where we draw the line. They would draw the line at the AR-15 and its counterparts -- which, despite the judge's claim, are commonly used for legal, defensive purposes… While used in several high-profile mass shootings, the AR-15 is favored among homeowners, hunters and sport shooters. It's popular for both sport and self-defense among women, who find it easy to carry and handle. Crime rates and homicides have dropped as concealed-carry laws spread nationwide. As more citizens are armed, predators find it harder to find unarmed victims except in gun-free zones such as the school in Newtown, Conn., or the theater in Aurora, Colo.

Critics of the Second Amendment say that they are not going after guns used for legitimate activities such as hunting. But when the Founders wrote the Second Amendment it was because the British were coming, not because it was the start of deer season. As Fox News contributor Judge Andrew Napolitano notes:

The historical reality of the Second Amendment's protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer… It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and ammunition that the Nazis had, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.

The AR-15 is a defensive weapon, such as when it was used by a 15-year-old who grabbed his father’s AR-15 and used it to ward off home invaders:

Not only did this brave 15-year-old defend his home against 2 burglars, but also his 12-year-old sister who was in the house with him. He grabbed his father’s AR-15 and shot one of the burglars multiple times. They got away but had to go right to the hospital where the minor was arrested and the adult who was shot was flown to a different hospital.

If the AR-15 had been available in 1776, George Washington would have fielded an army armed with it, to be sure, but just as surely every farmer, blacksmith, carpenter, and shopkeeper would have grabbed an AR-15 on their way to the village green to protect our freedoms from the same government tyranny the writers of the Constitution sought. to protect us from and that Peter Francis O’Rourke would impose on us.

In the hands of British redcoats, the musket was an assault weapon. In the hands of a law-abiding American, an AR-15 is what the Second Amendment is all about.

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.