The old saying ‘never bring a sword to a gunfight’ turns out to be bad advice – at least for Guillermo Tovar, who survived being held at gunpoint in his own house when he cut the gunman’s trigger finger off before he could fire.

The gunmen broke in to Tovar’s east Memphis house in the small hours of the morning on November 4. They kicked down his front door, pointed a gun at his son’s head and demanded cash and jewelery, before pistol-whipping Tovar unconscious.

A sword: mightier than the gun. Less mighty than the pen. Maybe.

In similar news: Never bring a plunger to a sword fight Burglar leaves his finger behind




It was when Tovar came to that things got interesting.

He grabbed a sword from underneath the couch – described as a cavalry-type sabre, which the household used for cutting vegetation in the garden – and confronted the burglars. With a gun pointed at him and the intruder’s finger already on the trigger, Tovar swung the sword – cutting the man’s trigger finger off.

The armed robbers fled – crucially, forgetting to pick up the missing bit of finger. Police wre able to take a usable print from the finger, and match it to a man who already had a criminal record.

While the hunt for the man continues, police expect proving the 9.5-fingered man’s guilt to be one of the easier cases they’ll have. As Lt. Mickey Williams noted: ‘I would think he’d have a hard time explaining how his finger got left in this home.’