Gaston, North Carolina:

A would-be burglar who’d been scared off from one house by a 70-year-old woman found himself a few minutes later staring down the wrong end of a shotgun at another, police say.

And before the sun rose Sunday, Joshuah Scott Rutledge probably figured out that this northern Gaston County town wasn’t ripe for the picking.

“If they think Stanley is sleepy, they’ve got another thing coming,” said 56-year-old Phyllis Osborne, who now calls her 62-year-old husband Richard her “knight in shining armor.”

Rutledge, 26, of Oakboro was reportedly climbing through a bathroom window of a woman’s home on the 3500 block of N.C. 27 in Stanley at 4:30 a.m. Sunday when the woman, who’d had her 70th birthday the week before, spotted him and scared him away before he could get inside.

He then apparently went to a house across the street off N.C. 27 on Watts Street, this time making it inside.

But once inside he found himself staring at Richard Osborne and an old shotgun that his wife’s grandfather had once used to slaughter hogs. Whether the gun would still fire a shot remains in question.

Apparently, the punk didn’t feel lucky.

Something that needs to be constantly hammered when talking about gun control is that, when it comes to self defense, a gun is the only tool available that allows a huge segment of the population to equalize or neutralize the threat of criminals younger and stronger than they are.

And this doesn’t only apply to the very valid “but criminals would still have guns” argument. Even if you could “wave the magic wand” and make all firearms everywhere vanish in a poof, the older and weaker among us would be at the mercy of the young thug. Therefore, even if it were possible to 100% disarm 100% of the criminals, guns would be 100% necessary.

We should be asking “Why do gun control proponents want to make victims of senior citizens?“