A man from Gold Bar, Wash. — a town of about 2,000 — broke into the woman’s home around 8:30 p.m. Thursday while she was enjoying an evening with her husband, 75, and son, 45. According to a Komo News report, police said the man broke in through the back door. After hearing a noise, the woman walked into the back room, where the 25-year-old intruder stood, wielding a large knife.

Her husband was on the ground.

The intruder had stabbed her husband in the abdomen, felling but not killing him. Before calling 911, the woman took matters into her own hands, according to the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office. She snuck in the back bedroom, presumably unnoticed, where she grabbed a gun she hides there.

She returned to the main room, took aim and fired several shots into the intruder, killing him.

Take two minutes to flip through the new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll and you are left with two very clear takeaways:

1. Hillary Clinton is deeply vulnerable in a general election.

2. Donald Trump and, to a lesser extent, Ted Cruz, are the exact wrong candidates to take advantage of Clinton's weaknesses.

Start with this: Just one in three (32 percent) of general election voters see Clinton in a positive light while 56 percent regard her negatively. That's Clinton's worst score since NBC-WSJ started asking about Clinton's image in early 2001.

And, the NBC-WSJ numbers are far from an outlier. Her numbers -- particularly when it comes to the number of people who view her as "honest" and "trustworthy" have long been in net negative territory -- and the ongoing questions surrounding her private email server while serving as Secretary of State doesn't help matters. The simple fact is that Clinton is totally known by the general electorate and somewhere between mildly and strongly disliked by a majority of them.

While gun violence in the U.S. has significantly declined since the 1990s, mass public shootings are on the rise, and schools are now viewed as vulnerable targets. One of the deadliest in history claimed 28 lives, including 20 children, after Adam Lanza opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.

Last October, a gunman fatally shot nine people at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore.

These incidents, and every school shooting in between, have sent mourning parents and distraught education officials on a search for effective preventative measures.

One that has long been bandied about, and now being tested in schools countrywide, is allowing teachers to bring guns to school.

The Kingsburg Joint Union High School District in Kingsburg, Ca., is the latest district to pass such a measure. At a school board meeting on Monday, the Fresno Bee reported, members unanimously approved a policy that allows district employees to carry a concealed firearm within school bounds.

Clinton is now viewed unfavorably by 55 percent of the electorate, according to the HuffPost Pollster average, which tracks findings from 42 different polling outfits. Only 40.2 percent of people view her favorably, according to that average.

“The No. 1 reason that her favorability is so bad is that you have large numbers of Americans who say they don’t trust her,” he said. “I could make it sound more complicated than that, but that’s really what it is. Voters see her as the ultimate politician, who will do or say anything to get elected.”

The historic comparisons are stark. At this point in the 2008 presidential cycle, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) was seen favorably by 62 percent of voters and unfavorably by just 33 percent. Even in February 2012, the closest comparable point in his re-election campaign, he had a net positive favorability rating in the Gallup poll of 2 percentage points, compared to Clinton’s current net rating of minus 11.

Today, in Caetano v. Massachusetts, the Supreme Court vacated a decision by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts that had concluded that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms does not apply to stun guns. The Court’s per curiam opinion scolded the Massachusetts court for its failure to apply the proper legal tests under D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, and quite rightly so. The court did not reach the ultimate question of whether stun guns constitute “arms” for Second Amendment purposes, however, instead vacating and remanding the state court opinion.

Kawain Tyrell Smalls, 21, of Woodbridge, pleaded guilty in November to first-degree murder for the Nov. 10, 2014 shooting death of 16-year-old Brenden Wilson.

At an emotional sentencing hearing Monday, Prince William Circuit Court Judge Steven S. Smith sentenced Smalls to 75 years in prison, with 25 years suspended, plus three years of probation.
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Conway asked the judge to sentence Smalls to life in prison, with all but 50 years suspended, citing his lengthy criminal record and the seriousness of the crime. Smalls had several prior convictions, including convictions for violent crimes and firearms offenses. He was out on bond, and on house arrest with an ankle bracelet monitoring device at the time of Wilson’s murder Conway said.

A masked man burst into a 7-Eleven near Seattle early Sunday morning, swinging a hatchet and slicing the store clerk.

Before the masked man could seriously hurt anyone, however, a customer who had been drinking his morning coffee pulled out a concealed weapon and fatally shot the attacker.

Authorities did not name the attacker or the customer, but they did hail the concealed weapon owner as a hero.

“This could have been disastrous,” King County Sheriff Sgt. Cindi West told KIRO 7. “Had this guy not shot, who knows what would have happened. We might have a dead clerk right now, and instead we have a dead bad guy.”

A 37-year-old Spotsylvania County man who was attacking his girlfriend was shot and killed by the girlfriend’s son, the county sheriff’s office said.

They said John Conroy, Jr., was killed in a house on Towles Mill Road after an argument escalated and he began physically attacking her in her son’s presence, the sheriff’s office said.

In a statement, the office said the son, who is not related to Conroy, tried to intervene. Based on initial information, the statement said, the son, who is a juvenile, got a gun that had been in the room, and fired several shots. Conroy was hit at least twice, the sheriff’s office said. The son’s age was not given.