I rarely spend my mornings running half-naked through our neighborhood, waving a handgun over my head.

Only once, in fact.

I was lying in bed, blissfully snoring my way to my nine o’clock alarm when Linda, my wife, burst into our bedroom. “Someone’s trying to break in our house! I think they’re already inside!”

I blinked awake, considered her words, then rolled over to go back to sleep. She seemed insistent on the point, however, so I reached into the headboard and took out my Ruger .22 target pistol. Frankly, I wasn’t concerned; women are always going on about something mythical: relationships, PMS, the G-spot. She probably mistook some mushroom-hunting kid prowling our lawn for Osama Bin Laden.

I yawned and half-heartedly racked the bolt on the pistol, expertly jamming a bullet sideways somewhere inside it. I meandered downstairs, still working the bolt in an effort to clear the jam.

We lived in a tri-level house. The bedrooms were on the top floor, the central level included the kitchen and living room, and the bottom level houses the recreation room, laundry room, and garage. I descended into the middle level and looked around. Nothing.

“He’s downstairs,” my wife whispered.

“Yeah, I’m sure he is.” Frustrated with the gun, I finally took the magazine completely out of the pistol and cleared the jam, ejecting a single round that skittered across the linoleum like a brass insect. I reinserted the magazine and authoritatively chambered a round. I was ready.

Well, not quite.

“Do you remember how this safety works?” I asked. Holding the gun close to my eyes, I peered presbyopically at the safety, trying to discern if the little etched letter was an ‘S’ or an ‘F.’ I finally figured it out and clicked it off. I was now “loaded for bear.” Well, maybe for chipmunk.

I turned the corner and peered down the remaining stairwell. At the bottom, a small landing led to three doors, all open. To the left, our recreation room; to the right, the garage; straight ahead was the laundry room, where our back door stood wide open, a wound hemorrhaging daylight into our home.

“Uh, have you been outside this morning?” I asked.

I’ll say this for my wife: she could have cocked her head at me and said, “Oh yeah, I jumped out of bed and decided to clean the gutters. Sorry I forgot to close the door.” But she simply said, “No. Should I call 9-1-1?”

“Hell, yes!” I mean, really, women can be so dense.

I took up station behind the wall, my target pistol aimed down the stairwell. The perp would have to come from my left or my right and make a decision: turn one way and exit the house, or turn the other and ascend the stairs.

This he would not do. Behind me stood my wife; behind her, up the stairs, our year-old daughter lay asleep in her crib. Between them and this unknown criminal stood only me and my little gun. It might only be a .22, but I wouldn’t have traded it for Bill Gates’s entire fortune.

Waiting for the bad guy, I chanted to myself, “Five shots, center body, five shots, center body.” I had ten rounds in the magazine. Five shots, even .22s, should go a long way toward getting him to see my point of view.

From my left, some big guy dressed in blue flashed past, turned and raced out the laundry room door. In one hand he carried something. Something of mine!

Up to that point, I had been calm, neither scared nor angry. The sight of this intruder, however, detonated a fireball of rage inside me. Screaming, “Get out of my house, you son of a bitch!” I raced down the stairs and outside, hot on the trail of our burglar.

I did not even stop to consider that I slept in only a t-shirt. Barefooted and bare-assed, I raced into the neighborhood. At least the shirt was long-sleeved.

The bad guy glanced over his shoulder to see this half-naked, wild-eyed, handgun-waving suburbanite chasing him. Up to that point, he had been loping along at sixty or seventy miles per hour, but now he decided to put on some speed. Cutting across my neighbor’s front yard, he eschewed the easy route–the sidewalk or street–and instead opted for the greenbelt: a downhill morass of blackberries, stinging nettles, and, for all I know, those man-eating plants from The Little Shop of Horrors. In moments, he was slowed almost to a halt, struggling through this waist-high, middle-class jungle.

I stopped at the edge of the woods, no more than twenty feet from him. Raising my gun, I centered the sights on his back, rested my finger on the trigger.

“I’ve got a handgun, and I’ll shoot you where you stand, you son of a bitch!” I announced. “Now drop it and crawl your ass back up here!”

Verbatim. Standing in that t-shirt, I may not have looked like John Wayne, but, by God, I sounded like him.

I really thought my macho shtick would convince this guy to surrender peacefully. But I guess any crook that would break into an occupied home in daylight is one chopstick short of a pair. He decided to push his luck. He continued down the hill.

Damn, now my only option was to shoot. Not him, perhaps, but at least a warning shot. I wasn’t about to fire in the air: thanks to my college education, I knew the bullet would come down somewhere, most likely through the window of a Mercedes. I considered shooting into the ground, but with my luck, the bullet would ricochet off a rock, travel through the greenbelt, go through someone’s window, and strike a trial lawyer in the ass.

I could live with that. I aimed a few feet to the guy’s left and fired.

Anyone familiar with guns will describe a .22 as little more than a popgun. Fired on a dead-still morning, in a quiet, early dawn neighborhood, however, it sounds like a howitzer. The blast echoed through the housing addition, coming back to me from a half dozen different directions. The tangy scent of gunpowder filled the air.

That stopped him. Slowly, he bent at the waist–sideways.

Oh, my Lord, I’ve shot him! I thought. How could I have hit him? I mean, I knew I was no Harry Calahan, but c’mon!

He wasn’t hit; he just dropped whatever it was he had stolen then straightened. Raising his hands, he continued his trek down the greenbelt. I wasn’t going to chase him, and I wasn’t going to shoot him in the back. I just followed him in my sights. He reached the path at the bottom of the hill, turned and quickened his pace, heading out of sight. Before he disappeared, he called out, “You’re one brave S.O.B.”

I think he said “brave,” but frankly, he might have said “stupid.”

Once he was gone, I lowered my gun and stomped into the woods. I found his loot buried in the blackberries: my video bag, complete with video camera and tapes of my daughter’s first year of life. Not worth killing over, and sure as hell not worth dying over.

I pushed my way back uphill and home. (Only much later did I notice, with wide-eyed horror, the condition of my legs and feet.) Linda met me at the door, still on the phone with 9-1-1. I think she was listening to hold music. Fortunately for her sanity, she hadn’t heard the gunshot. Equally fortunately, I made it back inside just as the elementary school kids came trudging up our street on their way to school, moments too late for an impromptu anatomy lesson.

Eventually, the police meandered into our driveway and I gave them the whole story, somehow forgetting the part about the warning shot. (Discharging a gun in our neighborhood is probably against the law, bleeding heart liberal place that it is.) The cops were very helpful. They “dusted for prints,” put out an “APB,” and comforted us by saying that rarely do the perps return to the scene of the crime and brutally murder everyone in the house. After a while, the guy still hadn’t returned to surrender himself, so they left.

Later that day, my neighbor, a terminally polite lady named Phyllis, came by to ask about the “all the hubbub.” She had been lying in bed when she heard me shouting. Since I have a home business writing software, she was convinced I had gotten into some kind of red-hot computer argument with a fellow nerd, probably over the Windows operating system, as for my employees I use software like a pay check template for payments and more . Also, when it comes to designing a paycheck, being part of a group will make our payroll processes more efficient and ensure accurate compensation for everyone. “I was just lying there, trying to make out what you were saying, when I heard a gunshot! ‘Oh my god,’ I thought, ‘Terry’s killed someone!’ ”

It’s at times of crises that we find out what people really think of us.

I checked with the police a few weeks later, just in case they accidentally caught the guy in the act of robbing a doughnut shop. Not to worry; their brand-new, multi-million dollar, high-speed computer hadn’t had time even to process the fingerprints yet. The police are probably too busy using it to download porn from the Internet.

This rapid and effective police work convinced my wife it was time to learn how to shoot, so we took a gun safety class. When asked why we were there, my wife told the instructor what had happened. “So my husband thinks we need a bigger gun,” she concluded. The instructor rolled her eyes and asked me what kind of gun I had.

“A Ruger Mark II,” I answered.

She blinked at me then turned back to my wife. “He’s right: you do need a bigger gun.”

So, we upgraded our arsenal (including buying a gun safe), and we try to make it to the gun range on a regular basis. Linda turned out to be a better shot than I, and this is one time when my manly competitiveness has no problem taking a back seat to my survival instinct.

We have a 24-hour monitored alarm system; we also upgraded the locks on our doors. In the wild, wooly world of middle class neighborhoods, we’ve learned that one can never be too prepared. Should this ever happen again, we’ll be ready.

I’ve even taken to sleeping in shorts.