Victimize old people at your own peril.

That's just what three punks in Kentucky learned on Labor day as they broke into the home of a 92 year old man. That man, World War Two vet Earl Jones, shot one of them in the chest as they came up out of his basement.

92-year-old Verona man shoots intruder at home

Now one is dead and the other two are in jail. And Mr. Jones, he's safe, but a little angry over the whole ordeal.

“These people aren’t worth any more to me than a groundhog,” Jones told the Enquirer. “They have our country in havoc. We got so many damned crooked people walking around today.”

In Earl Jones’ mind, his actions are justified, as well. He said he was completely within his rights to defend his life and ranch home on the 500-acre farm he has worked since 1955.

“I was hoping another one would come up – I aimed right for his heart,” Jones, who served in the U.S. Army Air Forces from 1941 through ’46, told the Enquirer Monday afternoon. “I didn’t go to war for nothing. I have the right to carry a gun. That’s what I told the police this morning.”

Jones has lived alone since his wife, Virginia Pearl, died in 2006. The couple had no children. Jones grew up hunting squirrels in Boone County and volunteered for the forerunner to the U.S. Air Force in 1941. He went through weapons training in the military.

He is not happy that police took the rifle used in the shooting.

“How am I going to protect myself if they come back looking for revenge?” he said.

Jones didn’t like how deputies treated him. “They stood down there with their guns on me, yelling, `Get your hands up! Get your hands up!’” he said. “I told them, `I’m not putting my damn hands up.’”

Finally, he did. Police approached up the long gravel driveway, flanked by a field of tobacco that Jones rents to another farmer, and questioned him.

“Was I scared? Was I mad? Hell, no,” Jones said. “It was simple. That man was going to take my life. He was hunting me. I was protecting myself.”

Now there's a man with character. Hell, you might even say that he's got true grit. And if this guy were my neighbor, he'd have pretty much the choice of weapons in my gun safe to borrow until he gets his own gun back.