You’re a mother of two small children.  Your husband is away on business.  In the middle of the night, you hear someone in your home, and when you investigate, you are attacked by a man armed with a pipe and a knife.  He lands a couple of blows on you, but you’re still on your feet.

What do you do?

If you’re Yael Matzpun, who lives in a small community a few kilometers from the border with Gaza, you fight through your injuries, lay a beating on your attacker, lock him in a bathroom, and call the police after you get you and your kids to safety.

This tough-as-nails woman was physically harmed, but knew that if she didn’t fight, she and her kids were dead, so she defended herself, her family, and her home with her bare hands.   Unfortunately for Mr. Piece-of-crap-murderer, he chose to attack someone who is trained in hand-to-hand combat.  He was, however, able to crawl out a window and be shot down like the jackal he was by the police when he refused to drop his weapons.

I will say this: Mrs. Matzpun is to be commended for her actions, and I’m glad that her injuries weren’t worse and that her children were unharmed.  But she is a person with an uncommon skill set, and even with that, she got lucky.  The first blows with that knife could have been lethal, or at least debilitating.  Bringing your fists to a knife fight doesn’t work very well most of the time.  Heck, bringing a knife to a knife fight usually means you’re getting cut up as much as the other guy, even if you win.

Unless I have no other choice, I’m forcing the other guy to bring his knife to a gun fight.  I don’t trust my own unarmed combat skills to be able to knock someone back enough that my family and I could escape, and I’m not trusting our safety to my ability to corral someone long enough for us to get out of the house.  I don’t know Krav Maga, ju-jitsu, or anything else, but I do know trigger control and good sight picture.

Congratulations to Mrs. Matzpun.  Let those murdering slimes think twice before they try to work out their warrior fantasies on sleeping innocent women and children.