An Idaho homeowner – and gun owner – found himself confronting a burglar on New Year’s Eve, but it didn’t go quite as you might expect. Bart Bryson was checking on his family’s second property, which is currently unoccupied, and when he pulled up, first slowing to check the mail, he spotted fresh footprints in the snow. Closer inspection showed the front doorknob had been forced, and this is where the account stops matching what you might expect.

Bryson says he’s a security guard, but he entered the house with his gun apparently holstered. He simply walked inside, and said it was after he’d entered the house a voice yelled “please don’t shoot me” as a figure ran at him. It was then, Byron said, “I grabbed my pistol.”

But he’d “grabbed” it a bit late, and the intruder ran into him. Apparently two shots were then fired into the floor, and I haven’t been able to find out if they were intentionally or accidentally fired that way. Here’s Bryson’s account of the following moments: “I thought, I’ll kill him if I have to, because I’m not going to get killed, and I’m not going to get knocked out either,” he said. “But the gunshot scared him enough, apparently it scared him enough that he fell down thinking maybe I shot him. I thought I had hit him, the way he hit the ground, but he was just playing possum.”

As the man was prone on the ground before him, and Bryson, by his own words, did not know if he had hit him with those two shots – making me think they weren’t purposefully fired into the floor but were accidentally fired and just happened to hit the floor – he decided to ask the man if he’d been shot. The would-be burglar said no, and Bryson had to decide what to do, because he had left his cell phone at home.

Bryson decided he, himself, would simply take the burglar to the police – yes, really. So he left the burglar lying prone on the floor of the empty house and walked back outside to his car, which is where his handcuffs had also been left behind (remember, he’s a security guard, so he had handcuffs).

The burglar, not being a complete fool, took this golden opportunity to make a run for it.

Seeing his not-quite-prisoner fleeing, Bryson decided to fire his gun a few more times. He says he fired these rounds into the ground because he didn’t want to kill anyone over a burglary. The perpetrator got away. And unsurprisingly, police were already en route because neighbors had called 911 after hearing shots fired the first time.

One more thing: Bryson ran out of ammo with all his shots fired into the floor and ground. He didn’t have any more, not on his body or in his car.

I’ve been unable to find an article saying what kind of gun Bryson used although I’m inclined to believe it was a revolver, mostly because I’d prefer to think he didn’t fire more shots than that into the floor and ground. This is where I will stop, although I will include one of the many links to the news story, because I want to know one simple thing: what do you guys think?

News article: http://www.ktvb.com/story/news/local/2014/12/29/homeowner-burglary-shots/20994517/