Chris Gaither was home alone “petting the dogs” on Wednesday morning when he heard a noise upstairs.

The 11-year-old boy from Talladega, Ala., told NBC affiliate WVTM-TV that he was scared, so he grabbed a knife and steadied himself.

Chris said that a man appeared on the stairwell, but when confronted, he ran back up upstairs. When the man reappeared moments later, the boy told WVTM-TV, the individual was holding a gun.

“When he was coming down the stairs, that’s when he told me he was going to kill me, f-you and all that,” Chris said.

Instead of running, Chris told the station, he upgraded his weaponry, picking up a 9mm handgun that was in the home.

Once the man made it outside, Chris fired a warning shot. The man, who was carrying a stolen laundry hamper, began running. Chris emptied the clip, firing off 12 shots by the time the intruder neared a fence in the family’s front yard, the 11-year-old told the station.

The final shot hit the man in the leg as he was hopping the fence, the boy said.

“I shot through the hamper he was carrying,” Chris said. “It was a full metal jacket bullet. It went straight through the back of his leg. He started crying like a little baby.”

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.