Nearly shot my wife!

[telomerase]

You know, video cameras are cheap. If the lights work and you can use pinhole cameras, they're only about a dollar. Or you could mount a wireless one on your poodle and see what he's woofing at. Either way, in modern times the idea is to not be where the action is yourself...

Good locks don't seem to be cheap. It's hard to even find locks that aren't easy to pick (in the stores I mean). And good walls are pretty rare. But cameras, we got

 

[black_powder_Rob]

just get an alarm system and that will solve half of your problem, i would not go looking around ohh wait yeah I would but my house is not like yours and i have a lot of straight open hallways and it is easy to see and hear whats going on in the whole house from a few spots in the living room right outside of the M. bedroom. It would be easy for me to sit there and wait to see if I hear any noise and act accordingly. Again my house is not your house and i don't know what yours is like, my actions work for my house setup and prbably not yours.

 

[Barbara]

I guess that idea that ordering your wife to her bedroom like a child instead of an adult responsible for her own home is acceptable but does nothing for the fact that she probably spends a bit of time there without you.

If she hears a noise when you're not home, does she know enough to order herself into the bedroom?

 

[The_Pretender]

^ Win.

 

[The_Pretender]

A much easier way to have gone about this entirely would be to have not posted this at all. ("Nearly shot my wife" does not indicate smooth sailing for a thread.)

It really comes off as a John Wayne/Cowboy/Hero kind of ordeal. Told the pretty lady to stay put while searching out the threat.

It is a mixture of macho arrogance and ignorance. A botched ordeal that could have been much worse, and then displayed for the entire world to see as if it were a good thing. Any situation that could end up with a loved one hurt is not worth bragging about. It has only received countless analysis and scrutiny, leaving the OP to have to try and argue/reason/justify his own private business that should have never been made public in the first place.

Do what you want in your own home. But don't put it out in front of everyone and expect them to applaud your efforts.

This doesn't look good no matter how you spin it. Serves as a bad example more than anything.

My .02¢.

 

[danprkr]

I guess that idea that ordering your wife to her bedroom like a child instead of an adult responsible for her own home is acceptable but does nothing for the fact that she probably spends a bit of time there without you.

Wow, presumptive, politically correct, sexist and totally off base. All in one sentence. You're pretty good.

She knows that I've been around the block a few times as it were, where as she hasn't. She even knew this before this incident. I did not order her like a child, I laid out a plan based on my experience and knowledge. Granted it was a hasty plan that should have been in place long before the incident, but on the fly it was what could be done. Some in this thread have criticized my plan. Sharply. Which is a valid debate to have. However, she did not object so I had every right to expect her to be following it at the time.

If we'd suddenly had an emergency need to snow ski she'd be in charge since I have only a very rudimentary knowledge of that activity. Nor would I take her instructions as being condescending as you seem to think I was to her in this incident. It would be prudent to follow her lead in this hypothetical snow skiing emergency. Just as it was for her to follow my lead in this incident. Knowledge, experience, and real world events trump PC silliness every time. In short, get over it lady, doing the smart thing does not a sexist make.

If she hears a noise when you're not home, does she know enough to order herself into the bedroom?

As to the second part of your post regarding her knowledge. Had you read the previous posts you would have found where I've stated in several posts previously the one good thing to come out of all of this is that she has started to wake up, and realize that we need to plan for this sort of thing. Granted we're not where we need to be just yet, but we have begun the preliminary plannings. Some of those plans do include what she should do should she be home alone when an intruder comes.

So, as badly scared as I was I am supremely thankful for the wake up call aspect. It is, as it were, the silver lining in this particular cloud.

 

[danprkr]

This doesn't look good no matter how you spin it. Serves as a bad example more than anything.

Yep, and that's exactly why I posted it. I was after ways to avoid this in the future. And, I have received several good suggestions, some of which I'm in the process of implementing so that this does not reoccur. Strikes me as slightly humble and intelligent to seek knowledge in areas that you know you are lacking. As opposed to macho and stupid which you seem to think I am. But, maybe I'm just misreading my own motives. Or, maybe you're projecting yourself?

FWIW - it was her idea to arm ourselves and check out this noise. It was either let her do it, or I do it. I figured my going into harms way was better. No matter what you think of my abilities I'm head and shoulders above her since she's fired less than 200 rounds in her whole life, and never even considered such a scenario could happen to her. Where I on the other hand have trained, read, and educated myself, and am a much more adept marksman than her. Not knocking her, she's just inexperienced.

I hope one day to have her be a better shot than I. That seems to happen when I teach someone to shoot, and it always makes me proud. I would also take it as a point of pride if she was the better tactician.

As to the title of the thread. It drew attention to the thread, and got me some great information. Which was the purpose.

And once again I will state that I'm supremely happy that she and I are now working on these plans etc. That is the one good thing to have happened out of all of this.

 

[Cornbred]

If you desperately *need* to be somewhere else in the house (say, the armory or the kid's room, which probably aren't the same thing), you need to DASH.

How does dashing prevent you from being ambushed? It doesn't. If the BG is planning an ambush he is going to ambush if you "DASH" or clear your way to said location. At least if you a clearing you have the ability to put some well placed shots on target.

 

[hso]

but on the fly it was what could be done.

No it wasn't and you keeping reiterating it is only based on the debatable assumption that any search of the house was required at all.

 

[danprkr]

No it wasn't and you keeping reiterating it is only based on the debatable assumption that any search of the house was required at all.

A debate I have welcomed, and has brought up several points that I have taken into consideration. But, at the time a search was what I felt needed doing. So, I planned accordingly.

 

[Rail Driver]

Ok, I suppose my previous post was out of line or something because it seems to have disappeared like it never existed... Interesting!

However... On topic, when I hear a "noise" at night or whenever, I give my .22 pistol loaded with CCI Stingers to my gf and she posts up in front of my son's crib while I clear the house with the .40. I have a young child in the house and I'm not about to just roll over and go back to bed if an odd sound wakes me in the night. I know it's not advisable to clear the house, you should call the police etc etc... simple fact is that when you only have seconds, the police are minutes away.

If you are awakened by a noise in the night, by all means clear your house. Say you are awakened by a noise and you decide it's nothing and go back to sleep... there's a chance you won't wake back up if there is actually someone in your home that doesn't belong. Take my tv, my xbox, my pc... I don't care, stuff can be replaced and a life can't. That said, if I'm awakened by a noise at night I will do everything in my power to be certain that my home is secure before I go back to bed, even if it means my family calls me paranoid.

 

[Guillermo]

I guess that idea that ordering your wife to her bedroom like a child instead of an adult responsible for her own home is acceptable but does nothing for the fact that she probably spends a bit of time there without you.

It really comes off as a John Wayne/Cowboy/Hero kind of ordeal

It is a mixture of macho arrogance and ignorance.

There is NO WAY that the pretender intended this as a serious post

Thanks for the laugh pretender

 

[Guillermo]

I give my .22 pistol loaded with CCI Stingers to my gf

so she can't be trusted with a gun?

 

[hso]

If you are awakened by a noise in the night, by all means clear your house.

No

The point is that it's the only thing that most people know to do because so few people know how to be still and patiently listen to their home. Bad guys lack patience, that's part of their damaged thinking, they make noise, they move around. Heck, they're taking "stuff".

Secure the one thing that isn't replaceable, your loved ones, and then pay attention to what's going on. Better the BG walks into your prepared position.

I'll repeat what I said before, I helped run scenarios in a shoot house using simunition. The "house" was as familiar to us as our own homes (more so because we set it up for each scenario). The patient people that sat and waited and paid attention fared much better than the people that moved around. That was the case when we were the people moving through "our" house with a student waiting inside. The students that couldn't be still and wait were seen and hit far more often than the ones that waited for us to come to them.

The odds are never in your favor when your hunting through the place in the dark for a BG unless there's no BG there. The fact that most of the time there's no BG there leads people into the false sense of security in "clearing" their own house. Try going to a course where you have to actually do this with someone waiting for you somewhere in the "house" and you'll learn the difference.

 

[Rail Driver]

so she can't be trusted with a gun?

I trust her with a .22, do I not? A gun is a gun, regardless of caliber. If you MUST know, the only large caliber firearm I own currently is my sidearm, and I'm not about to clear the house with a .22. The .22 is a last resort, if the supposed intruder gets past me and the .40. I figure if 29 rounds of .40 (14+1 and 1 extra mag) don't stop the guy, 20 more rounds of .22 (2 magazines) will at least give him pause before he does what he plans to do. Worst case scenario, it's just more casings for the police to catalog into evidence and even the .40 wasn't enough. At least I gave her a chance.

 

[Rail Driver]

@hso: I'm not going to guess at your experience or lack thereof because I'm not privy to that information and because you and I don't know each other from Adam. I'm aware of the value of the "stop and listen" technique, and I didn't state my personal method of clearing the house, and the "sit and wait" method doesn't work for me. The problem with this is that not only do I value my loved one's lives, but I value their hearing in the event that I do have to discharge my firearm.

When I am awakened in the night by an out of place sound, I do wake my gf if she's not already up and I arm her before I exit the room. When I do exit the room, I stop outside the room and listen for any sounds before clearing the house, I don't just rush into whatever might be waiting.

Perhaps I left out a step or two in my last post, but I didn't think house clearing tactics was the central topic of the post. Either way, I reiterate my stance on this: CLEAR YOUR HOME before you go back to sleep. Not all intruders are idiots, and if you decide to not clear the house after not hearing anything, the possibility still exists that there's an intruder in your home with ill intent. Stop and listen by all means, but make sure your home is secure before returning to bed. That necessitates clearing the house.

 

[MariusDP51]

Bad guys lack patience

I have to disagree.

In our part of the world they observe their target for days or even weeks, studying your behaviour and movements. When they do strike, most often it happens when you're not around or during the dead of night when you are too fast asleep to wake up and be effective in a hurry.

But that is just here on the southern tip of the 3rd world...

There are times of course when they seemingly don't act patient, such as when they overpower a victim at home during daytime when only the wife/maid/elderly are home. Also a misconception, methinks.

 

[shockwave]

When I am awakened in the night by an out of place sound, I do wake my gf if she's not already up and I arm her before I exit the room. When I do exit the room, I stop outside the room and listen for any sounds before clearing the house, I don't just rush into whatever might be waiting.

Right. So we are discussing several things here and they are all related.

1. Strategy
2. Tactics

The safest, most conservative and all-around proven thing to do when you hear a bump in the night is to arm up, take the defensive spot behind the master bed and keep the guns trained on the locked bedroom door while dialing 911.

I'm never doing that unless I hear voices and crashing furniture on the other side of the door. In all cases that actually have happened here so far, I get up, grab a flashlight and go check out the noise. "Clearing" a house in my circumstances usually means ensuring the doors and windows are locked and secure.

Any repeat of the noise or additional sounds of any sort would radically change everything. Probably go for the gun at that stage.

As for tactics, you know how in the horror movies when the people decide to split up and you're shaking your head, saying out loud, "no, no, don't split up, stay together!" well that applies here. Once you've decided to go armed, stay together. Either stay put together or go investigate together. If you're now clearing while armed, you have double firepower and double clearing tactics available.

Even if the wife has only 200 rounds of shooting experience, that's plenty enough to point at a BG and open fire. The error in strategy that led to this near-disaster involved splitting up the team, who need to either stay together or remain in communication.

Per hso, however, SWAT practice or whatever isn't much of a factor for the average home defender. Far as I'm concerned, if a highly trained team of coordinated gunmen with automatic weapons plans to breach my home and execute me on sight, I'm already dead. I've done something seriously wrong to piss off the wrong people. The shooting is the aftermath. They could lay in wait in the garage and get me while I'm going out for the paper in the morning. They could booby-trap my car.

So my primary defense is to avoid having large armed teams of executioners come after me. Training to defend against such an attack is a separate matter from general home defense against robbers, rapists, serial killers, etc.

 

[Kleanbore]

CLEAR YOUR HOME before you go back to sleep.

That will work just fine--if there's no one there.

That is,

The odds are never in your favor when your hunting through the place in the dark for a BG unless there's no BG there. The fact that most of the time there's no BG there leads people into the false sense of security in "clearing" their own house.

That's why I did just great a couple of times.

But....

Try going to a course where you have to actually do this with someone waiting for you somewhere in the "house" and you'll learn the difference....The students that couldn't be still and wait were seen and hit far more often than the ones that waited for us to come to them.

So if there is an intruder, your chances are not so good---iffy at best.

Stop and listen by all means, but make sure your home is secure before returning to bed.

Good idea.

That necessitates clearing the house.

Not in my book. I can outwait them if they are there.

Not all intruders are idiots, and if you decide to not clear the house after not hearing anything, the possibility still exists that there's an intruder in your home with ill intent.

Well, yeah, there is that possibility. Slight, I'd say. So, maybe walking around with gun in hand will prove that there was no one there, and one can go to bed feeling very proud about how well he "cleared his house".

But if there is someone in the house, it all goes back to who is walking into whose ambush.

One may come upon and surprise an intruder, and he may not. He may do so only to be shot or whacked and disarmed by an accomplice. Unless the odds of not getting killed or injured were far, far less than remote, and training, simulation, and expert advice indicate that that is not the case, it just cannot be considered prudent at all by any reasonable standard of risk management.

After all, the likelihood of ever needing a gun is very low indeed and probably could be classified as remote, but we all think that having one is a good idea, don't we?

 

[Sam1911]

Per hso, however, SWAT practice or whatever isn't much of a factor for the average home defender.

I keep reading similar statements in lots of threads. It is quite curious. To paraphrase: "The people who research these things have discovered nearly universal truths. Those truths don't apply to me because I'm not the kind of person who researches these things."

And these kinds of statemets are often connected to a red herring or strawman argument which really distracts from the actual situation under discussion:

Far as I'm concerned, if a highly trained team of coordinated gunmen with automatic weapons plans to breach my home and execute me on sight, I'm already dead.

Again, to paraphrase, "In one-on-one or two-on-one encounters between identically armed simulated invaders and defenders, whomever moves around attempting to "clear" the house looses 90% of the time. But I'm not facing a large team of paramilitary assassins with automatic weapons and who would just blow up my car anyway, so the aforementioned training scenarios (which actually DO mimic my own situation) don't apply to me."

Sometimes it seems like a lot of effort must go into looking past answers which are unappealing to us.

 

[danprkr]

Or you could mount a wireless one [camera] on your poodle and see what he's woofing at.

Poodle? What real man would have a poodle as a watch dog? C'mon?

Seriously, right now I have 2 of the most worthless mutts on the face of the planet. The lab (my dog) would help you load everything I own for a milk bone. And the mutt (her dog) despite being a chow mix is the most cowardly dog I've ever met. Her and her sons adopted it when it was about a year old, and they think it was abused. So short of cat detectors my dogs are basically useless.

Oh well they're both getting old, so maybe next go around we'll have a better canine based alarm/defense system.

 

[danprkr]

Sometimes it seems like a lot of effort must go into looking past answers which are unappealing to us.

True in so many areas of life. But, keep in mind that as I have stated in some of my previous posts some folks are willing to accept a certain amount of risk to uphold their principals. At least in my case that is part of my thinking.

Having said that though I am somewhat alarmed at the odds. I am going to further research the issue to get outside confirmation, but if what I've read here is true (and I really don't doubt it) I will rethink my strategies etc. Still can't guarantee I won't go hunting if I hear something, but I will definitely think differently about it when/if I do.

 

[MariusDP51]

How much proven similarity is there between these simulated tests and real-life home invasions/defence? Are there any stats?

I am willing to bet that in real life, home owners defending their homes have a better than 90% success rate.

I say this because I read our newspaper articles regularly and I notice (from that at least) that those civilians that fight back uasually (much better than 90%) walk away with their life and belongings and a renewed will to live and defend themselves and the ones they love.

 

[MariusDP51]

Can we agree that those of us who have children can at least come out of hiding behind our beds and unlock our bedroom doors and, heaven forbid, leave the safety of our rooms to go and find our children and bring them to safety?

Just kidding. I think this discussion will give very serious food for thought to those of us who will still do what is clearly the wrong choice. Given the possible outcome and the high risk involved, I thin we will just take our actions and the planning and practice around that alot more seriously...

 

[danprkr]

Just basing this on what I've read here and not confirmed, I would expect that a homeowner v BG the homeowner would have somewhat of an advantage due to knowing the turf. As opposed to LEO v BG because the LEO would also not know the turf and be as hamstrung by that lack of knowledge as the BG. Just guessing of course.

But of course knowledge is power, and I am really intrigued by the idea of cameras to gain that knowledge in the event of an incident. That is one of the first things I'm going to work on. If I could just flip through the channels and know what was happening in every nook and cranny of my property without leaving my comfy chair I'd love it. Then if I see someone I could do as seemed appropriate with much more information on hand. Or, if I see a cat getting into the garbage I could just go out with the pellet gun.