Preparing for an attack!

[JShirley]

Do you have any earthly idea where or how I live, what I do, what I've done and what my skill levels are, or my defensive capabilities in hardware?

And I notice you avoid answering almost all of these, too. Why protest (oh, the humanity!) if you're still not going to answer?

Hi, I'm John. I joined the infantry after 2001, and did two years active. I was reactivated in 2006, and did a combat deployment to Afghanistan, where I engaged the enemy on many occasions. That's a little about me. There are many, MANY more experienced shooters than I here, despite the thousands of rounds I fired on active duty.

Now, who are you?

Oh, yeah- bookshelves work great, incidentally. Plywood only works at distance and at oblique angles.

 

[Spirit 1]

Well, all in all, this is the single most hostile internet forum environment I've ever come across! Unbelievable!!

"You got something more then a gut feeling based on anecdotal evidence? If so post it, if not, stop the unreal, fear mongering posts."

You need to get out more I think. With the literal explosion in gun sales & ammo sales in the last couple of years there's a rather strong indicator that something might be wrong in American's home safety. Take some time to notice one thing, over & over & over in ALL firearms forums: a desire for guns for HOME DEFENSE, or for CCW. Maybe many of you missed that somehow, guess so. A hot tip: choose a dozen major cities in the US and find the local news agencies online and see what they have to say about daily violence.

I didn't bother to read the rest of the replies here. I'm choosing to leave you all to each other's company, much like a shark tank at an aquarium. Maybe someday those troubled folks here with attitude problems will get their anti-social angst & control freak fetishes worked out, maybe not, and not my problem. Hopefully the other normal folks will survive their company.

Thanks very much to those polite members and others who only read and didn't post. Really a shame, because I found many very nice folks here. As for me and my house there's other places to be. Enjoy yourselves!

Spirit 1

 

[Kindrox]

Has Spirit gotten defensive? Yes, but he was asking a simple question which there are answers too. How about we just focus on the answers to the questions and ignore the answers to the question we hoped he would ask? Give him the real deal answer and let him be an adult, take the information, and draw his own conclusions.

I get annoyed when answers are “don’t think, just do x because I said so”

Is it pratical to make the interior walls of your pre-existing house bullet proof? I don’t think so, but if it helps you sleep at night, there are things that can be done to improve the odds of stopping a bullet. I don’t know them all, but this is one. I am a big fan of concrete board. It is dense and lasts forever, and I have used it inside the house as I have remodeled. Texture it as you would sheetrock and no one is the wiser. Plywood, other than making you live like a nut, is also flamible and a bad idea for this reason alone. I didn’t use hardi board to stop bullets but to stop termites and you don’t have the brittling with age you get with regular sheetrock.

It is only about 4X sheetrock so won’t break the bank, and you cut it with regular carbide tipped saw blades. Just keep using the same one on the hardi board since it won’t be any good for wood anymore. When cutting around outlets and the like I draw the box that needs to be cut, drill the corners with a normal drill bit, and then use a jig saw metal cutting jig saw blades or really cheep wood cuting blades. Hardi board wears them out fast.

That will give 1” of concrete for every set of interior walls. I have no idea how many inches you need to stop a 9mm round but probably more than a couple inches. If you are really into this, nothing keeps you from stacking two sheets on top of each other for thickness.

Assuming you have the foundation for it (I live in a slab house so didn’t even think of the issue till another ilbob brought it up) nothing keeps you from filling the empty spaces between the studs with something. Brick is easy for the bottom and some people use small pebbles top to bottom.

If you did this, I would not assume the wall is bullet proof (at a minimum you have a 8.5% chance of hitting a stud, which a normal 9mm is going to zip through) but between this and the hardi board it should improve your odds substantially and is not expensive, even less so if you were going to re-sheetrock anyway.

If you want to go that one step extra, instead of texturing the surface of the hardi board, tile it instead with a tough ceramic tile. You can do this in bathrooms and it won’t even look odd there.

Again, I didn’t do what I did to make my house bullet proof, I was remodeling anyway. But all things being equal, why not take the road that might give a bit of an edge? People here go to extreem lengths to defend against the absolute and quite improbable worst (and attack others for not doing so!), so what exactly makes Spirit’s underlying (I’m not touching the plywood issue – that is nuts ) question crazy?

 

[Kindrox]

Well, all in all, this is the single most hostile internet forum environment I've ever come across!

You haven't really helped yourself either. You don't go into a biker bar and start talking a little smack (come on, you know you have) and this is not a good place for it either. When asking questions, take the good and to the degree possible, just flat out ignore the bad. Decide quickly if you are here to learn or here to change opinions.

There are people here who can actually answer questions. Be nice, don’t get distracted, and look for the good.

 

[lamebums]

I've only read the first page or so, so I may have entirely missed the boat here, but:

If you're concerned about people approaching from the house on the outside, then hardening the wall with plywood would not only be impractical but probably ineffective.

It would seem so much more effective to just place a bookshelf near a window. If I was concerned, I would do just that - and make sure the lower shelves are filled with magazines, newspapers, etc. Between that and the wall, that'd stop almost anything.

But I'm not concerned at the moment. I live in a fairly quiet suburban neighborhood. Generally, you have more to fear from the police than from criminals. If someone's peeping around my place at night and shouldn't be there, I'll meet them with a 9mm and a flashlight, probably in my jammies. Maybe an AK if I'm having a bad day. If that isn't enough, then I haven't been paying enough attention to the news to know that society's gone downhill.



On second thought, looks like the guy's gone.

Why are so many people closer to special ed than special forces. To paraphrase someone's signature (although who is escaping me at the moment).

 

[Magnumdood]

Training vs. Hardening

Kindrox,

Spirit got his panties in a wad because nearly everyone told him to concentrate on training and forgo trying to "harden" an already existing structure. Basically, you train so you can stop a threat of lethal force with lethal force. If you want to have a bullet-resistant structure, build it from the ground up. I can think of some likely examples, but the fact is we're not building a house anytime soon, so I'll concentrate on training. Spirit didn't want to hear that. I was a Texas Peace Officer from 1983 to 2000. I became an NRA-certified law enforcement pistol and rifle instructor for peace officers and civilians. I taught SWAT techniques and I taught firearms safety in the home to the citizens in our region plus I taught Concealed Carry classes.

I've been in several live fire fights, but I can't come close to the guys on here who served active military duty. However, the LE mission is very much different than the Military mission. Law Enforcement's goal, when engaged in a lethal force encounter, is to stop the behavior that is putting the LEO or an innocent third party in imminent fear of serious bodily injury or death. Once we stop the threat we deescalate and tend to the wounded. An LEO may should a perp in a few seconds, then holster his weapon, cuff the injured perp and administer first aid and try to save his life. I may be wrong, but I don't think the military cares quite that much about the "rights" of an enemy combatant (though, with the current administration, who knows what those clowns are going to expect of the US military).

My long-winded point is training training and more training are what you should be doing if you're that worried about a home invasion (of which there is NO statistical evidence of an increase in home invasions). Have a plan for the family and execute it several times a month so they too are engaged in the training.

I don't involve my family in some home-invasion practice scenario. It would needlessly alarm them. I provide the security, and I'm going to get another Rottweiler as soon as I can.

When I worked night patrol, my wife, son and daughter were often home alone; alone with a 125 lb yellow lab and 105 lb Rottweiler. If somebody knocked on the door (pizza delivery for example), both dogs hit the door physically and barked and growled until she called them off. You should have seen the faces of the people on the other side of the door when she opened it. My friends all experienced the barrage of the door from the inside; they said they were afraid the dogs were going to take the whole door frame down with them. Those dogs were a great comfort to my wife. She was a Peace Officer for about 2 years and decided that wasn't for her, so she also had a gun at home and she knew then and knows now how to use it.

Thee are just so many more practical things you can do that to start hauling 1" flooring plywood or cement board into your upstairs apartment and begin nailing it to all the walls.

 

[JShirley]

Well, all in all, this is the single most hostile internet forum environment I've ever come across!

You haven't been out much, then. Especially this forum at THR, puts a damper on braggadocios ignorance over substance, but dissecting the ridiculous is considerably different than outright hostility.

Unbelievable.

Yes, it is. So we won't.

I didn't bother to read the rest of the replies here.

Aw, shucks. Then, you're just proving yourself wrong, right?

I'm choosing to leave you all

This is the part where you prove you didn't look around before you started posting, or you would have read the "don't be a drama queen" part of the Courtesy Primer. Vaya con Dios.

John

 

[Makotoseven]

don't use a FMJ round AK and aim for the soft squishy torso part of the badguy.

problem solved

 

[JShirley]

Right? I recall the "problem" Pete Kokalis had with most of the cheap imported 7.62x39mm HP was that it fragmented almost immediately in tissue, not penetrating to his preferred 18" or more depth...

J

 

[Kindrox]

nearly everyone told him to concentrate on training

What does that mean? To some, that means shooting a couple hundred rounds a week. Due to my job, side business, and family, for me that means shooting every other month at best, and the wife shooting a couple times a year. You can judge that as way deficient but that is the reality of our situation - we have more money than time.

So I trade things off differently perhaps than you do – by the place I live, how the outside of the house is defended, and yes, how the house itself is defended. So who am I to judge Spirit on his questions and tell him “you don’t need this, you need more training.” Maybe he is all trained up according to the limits of his time, and has excess money on the sidelines he could use to improve his security?

If someone comes on this board focusing on an improbable threat but with a “politically correct” focus, everyone is plum ok with that. But if someone tries to balance two improbable scenarios (one politically correct, the other politically incorrect), or just has questions about something politically incorrect, they get lectured like a dummy.

 

[JShirley]

Well, he started out with something that may have been true- *I* haven't noticed... but which was due to either lack of attention or lack of adequate research. There are numerous posts on this board where folks start talking about hardware solutions like firearms, and others chime in, suggesting they do things like prep their environment first:

lock doors
good locks
good doors
proper outside lighting, and correct ambient inside lighting
install gates on isolated property
chimes and other notifications of vehicle approach
prickly shrubbery denying close stealthy approach to households

even down to sm's common-sense, easy and inexpensive suggestion of using rubber doorstops to prevent easy door forcings.

From there, the OP spun straight off into fantasy land. Then he wanted to protest about what people didn't know about him...without telling anything substantive about himself. Some folks.

 

[Kindrox]

Sure the OP did not help himself. But he did run into a lot of people not answering his question and telling him he is a dummy. Nobody got on to them, now was there? What is high road around here depends largely on what is politically correct around here, and the perch you sit on.

Post 61 actually has a real answer, gasp!, useful to me. I don't (think I) know what a rubber doorstop is, so that gives me something to look into. So 61 posts in we managed to get off the lecture circuit and give some real information.

 

[JShirley]

Okay, it would have been a lot easier to handle this well if the first post hadn't jumped straight out in fantasy-land. That meant a lot of effort was going to be put into shooting down silly suggestions like air-raid sirens inside your house and (for cripe's sake!) "armoring" with plywood, especially since the OP made mistaken claims of what hadn't happened here already.

Door stop.

Some will obviously be more useful than others. This one is more expensive, but seems very sturdy.

Something I personally plan on doing, is having a front door that opens outward, set into a very sturdy frame. This has attendant risks (opens outward, giving up some control once door opens) and advantages (much harder to [brute] force), but I just won't open the door if the caller looks suspicious.

J

 

[Kindrox]

Another think you can do on the hinge side is drill holes exactly mirrored from the door into the door frame, and drive metal pins into one side. If the holes are exactly mirrored (might take a little fitting for the pins to swing into the matching holes on the other side) when the door is closed you are not relying completely on the hinges.

On the door latch side I use these massive brass (plated?) one peice units that replace the tiny metal brackets an ordinary door uses. And then I used 4" screwed to put that into the door frame. The weak spot of my doors now is the door failing around the locks.

 

[coloradokevin]

What does that mean? To some, that means shooting a couple hundred rounds a week. Due to my job, side business, and family, for me that means shooting every other month at best, and the wife shooting a couple times a year. You can judge that as way deficient but that is the reality of our situation - we have more money than time.

So I trade things off differently perhaps than you do – by the place I live, how the outside of the house is defended, and yes, how the house itself is defended. So who am I to judge Spirit on his questions and tell him “you don’t need this, you need more training.” Maybe he is all trained up according to the limits of his time, and has excess money on the sidelines he could use to improve his security?

While I can appreciate the point that you are trying to make, I think it is also fair to say that money can't bridge the gap between being trained and not being trained. I don't think that any of us were just simply trying to openly mock Spirit; instead we tried to point him in a better direction for achieving a goal of effective home security. In most cases the end user is far more important than the tool that is chosen for the job!

Even if a person doesn't have the time to get to a range on a regular basis, there is nothing stopping them from practicing dry fire drills, and supplementing that with the occasional range time.

Either way, Spirit became hostile when many of us suggested alternative plans (after determining --at least in our minds-- that his idea was relatively impractical). If Spirit feels that he can efficiently harden his house in a manner that will stop bullets, more power to him.

"You got something more then a gut feeling based on anecdotal evidence? If so post it, if not, stop the unreal, fear mongering posts."

You need to get out more I think. With the literal explosion in gun sales & ammo sales in the last couple of years there's a rather strong indicator that something might be wrong in American's home safety. Take some time to notice one thing, over & over & over in ALL firearms forums: a desire for guns for HOME DEFENSE, or for CCW. Maybe many of you missed that somehow, guess so. A hot tip: choose a dozen major cities in the US and find the local news agencies online and see what they have to say about daily violence.

Spirit, I think you just defined the anecdotal evidence that the other poster was speaking of! It is just a simple logic problem here. If people are buying guns and the news is reporting that the world is going sideways, does that mean that you have any greater statistical risk of a home invasion today than you did ten years ago? Of course not! The news media thrives on drama, not statistical fact; people buying guns do so for a variety of reasons, not always because their risk of being attacked is higher today than it was in years past (even if they believe the risk is higher today, it doesn't necessarily make it true). Even if home invasions had gone up, the factors you've listed don't prove that... rather, they prove that *you* believe that home invasions have gone up!

I don't mind that you asked the questions that you did, however I feel that you need to be a bit more receptive towards advice that doesn't always line up with what you thought you'd hear! There are a lot of experienced shooters on this website, and a number of us have real-world experience in dealing with tactics and shootings.

While protecting your family is an admirable goal, I just don't think that you'll achieve the results that you are looking for without a huge expense and compromise of your lifestyle. Are you planning to live in a plywood covered box? All I was trying to suggest in this thread is that you might put your time/money elsewhere, and perhaps achieve a greater benefit to your family!

 

[hso]

If the original post pointed out that we focus too much on the gun or ammunition while neglecting other simple means of making ourselves safe at home and had left it there he would have been reiterating what some of us have been saying for years here.

If he had said there are some simple ways to make it more difficult for BGs to get in the house and ways to delay and disorient them if they do he'd have been reiterating what some of us have been saying for years here.

It's the details of what were suggested as how to do those things that constituted unrealistic or even unsafe advice.

No one is going to screw layers of plywood to their interior walls of an existing house or apartment. Not going to happen. Not going to be effective either. Cut some plywood up and do your own penetration tests to find out how many layers are needed to stop a bullet.

No one is going to staple 10-2 romex up on their interior walls and attach large lights or sirens. This is Omega Man decorating and it's going to cause as many problems for you the homeowner as it does for the BG while the two of you stumble around blinded and deafened. Besides the fact that you won't be able to get anyone to live in the place with you.

What can you do that is reasonably effective and reasonably priced that looks reasonable enough? Lots of good suggestions amongst the shouting back and forth. Wedges, dogs, motion sensor lights, fences, wireless interior controls, gates, moving the sleeping arrangements around to keep family out of the line of fire are all simple, inexpensive layers of defense that help deter, delay, disorient anyone coming in to do harm.

Book cases have been mentioned a couple of times (I brought them up). Shooting longways though a full bookcase will stop rounds, but shooting though a book on a bookcase parallel with the pages won't. Just get a couple of old books at the thrift shop and try it. Packing large books in tightly and backing the bookcase with reinforcing material may or may not depending upon luck. OTOH, a couple of these things back to back have stopped 9mm and .45 cal in a test I did a few years ago. Will you want to have bookcases jammed full of books too tightly to remove and packed full from top to bottom? Probably not in a normal looking home.

BTW, if you haven't done penetration tests on Hardi or concrete board I wouldn't bet my life on them being any different than plywood. Remember that concrete board is concrete and fiber mesh and a hammer will make a nice hole in it (don't ask, it took another trip to the hardware store to get patching material).

Test your theories or ask if someone already has. I think I have some concrete board material left over around the house and I may just test it against some 9mm for ya'll this weekend.

 

[Kindrox]

I brought up concrete board primarly because you can't go sticking small rocks behind ordinary sheetrock. The concrete board has the strength for it, if you so inclined.