By Rob Morse
Striker Summary: Effective home security and armed defense requires gun owners to give the matter some forethought, to develop a plan and rehearse it regularly with loved ones — and to be suspicious of the way Mainstream Media frames armed self-defense stories.
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by Rob Morse
I wrote about a self-defense story and now I’m having second thoughts. There are a few sayings that capture a lot of wisdom. I’m thinking of ‘First do no harm.’ Right behind that is ‘The first rule of gunfighting is don’t get shot.’ Unfortunately, when we study how our neighbors defended themselves, we are usually working behind the veil of the news media. There is another truism, and that is the media only gives us some of the facts. I want to pour best practice all over this story and contrast it with what was reported in the news. The story sounded so simple at first.
One family member was waiting for someone to arrive home. It was after midnight when they were alerted by unusual sounds outside. They heard shouts. They saw their family member being robbed. They grabbed their gun and shot at the bad guys. The bad guys shot back as they ran away. None of the family members were injured.
None of the good guys were injured so I’d call this a success. For obvious reasons, I make it a point to not criticize the defenders. I wasn’t there and am commenting on what the media said rather than on what really happened. Even if the media gives us all the facts, we don’t know how they fit together and we’re ignorant of the many details that might influence a defender’s decisions. That said, let me show you what I worry about in this story. I have to begin somewhere else first.
We often talk about defending the inside of our home from attackers who are outside. In that case, we’d like to retreat to a back room. We want to get far away from the doorframe and use the bedroom doorway to conceal our position. Ideally, we’d like the intruder to be in a well-lit room while we defend ourselves from inside a darkened room. We’re doing what we can so that we see the bad guy better than he can see us. Now we’re going to turn that situation on its head.An easy target
Back to our original story, now we’re moving out of a lighted home and stepping onto our front porch at midnight to see what is going on. That means we might give the bad guys one of the best targets they could ask for. They can see us and we can’t see them hiding in the dark. Also, there is no place we can move as we come through the door onto the front porch.
We call doorways and stairs the “fatal funnel” for a reason. They work both ways and confine the bad guys as much as they confine the defenders.
Suppose there is a child or adolescent in the home. They hear the strange sounds and follow us onto the porch to find out what is happening. With the best of intentions, we’ve turned a bad plan into a nightmare scenario where several of our family could be hurt or killed.
That was all speculation on my part. You can accurately call it the overworked imagination of an overcautious mind. My fevered guesswork doesn’t mean the defenders faced an unsolvable problem. It means they needed a plan.
Let’s play out the scenario as if the good guys, like you, were well prepared.
- The good guy arriving home sees a strange car in front of the house or he sees strangers in his yard. The good guy drives to a neighbor’s house and calls home to find out what is going on. We win every fight we avoid.
- Motion sensors detect the bad guys moving around outside. They turn on the lights to illuminate the driveway next to the home and light up the yard near the front porch. The bad guys don’t like this at all.
- The good guys inside the house hear a chime when the motion activated lights come on. That could mean that their loved one arrived home. The shouts from outside signal that there is a serious problem. The good guy who arrived home stays inside his car with the doors locked.
- The good guys who were waiting inside the home shout an alarm to the rest of the family. One of them calls 911 just like they planned. One of them grabs a firearm and a flashlight because that was one of his jobs. The person who stayed awake waiting for their loved one was already armed. They point out how the victim outside is being robbed.
- The two-armed good guys turn off the lights inside the home and on the front porch. They exit the front and side doors of their home. They each move to cover where they can’t be shot. Now, the bad guys are visible and the armed good guys can’t be seen and are very hard to shoot.
- Red-dot sights work well in the dim and the dark. You still need enough light that you can identify your target and won’t shoot one of the good guys.
We’re not out to get the bad guys.
We’re trying to save our loved one who is being attacked outside.
We want to avoid a lethal problem rather than win a gun-fight. Motion-activated lights cost a couple of dollars at a big-box hardware store. A safety plan costs less but is probably worth a lot more. Installing the lights takes a few hours. Unlike the lights, you have to review your family’s safety plan every few months.
I want you and yours to be safe.
I gave you 500 words. Please share them with a friend and leave a comment. RM
The views here are those of the author and not necessarily Striker Journal.
Originally posted here.
Image: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/; https://www.flickr.com/photos/mesatacticalphotos/17753104690
Rob Morse writes extensively on firearm-related issues and other matters. He contributes to a number of publications and produces the Self-Defense Gun Stories podcast. He is also an amateur firearms instructor and competitor.
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