Re-Thinking Home Defense

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I use a Russian STK body with a BOGUSA Cree Q5 Super Premium drop in module. It required a little bit of fitting. The module is rated at 230 lumens. I wouldn't know lumens from nothing because I have no scientific instrument to measure them. I down own some acreage and have eyes that see so I can tell you it is much brighter than any other high output 2 battery light I've ever seen.

You don't have to use the same body I do. I got mine ridiculously cheap and I like it because it has an integrated weaver rail mount with a quick detach lever. Other than that there's nothing special about it, just a light body. The module itself will generally fit anywhere a P-60 lamp will, though as I said it may require some minor fitting. Availability is an issue but if you can get a Super Premium it just doesn't make sense to me to spend more on a Surefire that doesn't perform as well. Surefire does make good lights that do perform well and are readily available but you can always find something more powerful of equal quality for less money.

My light doesn't have a pressure switch on it. I don't like pressure switches, not the wires, not the extra parts to potentially fail. The switch on my light is a little push button tail cap. It doesn't even have a spring, frankly I have no solid understanding of how it works and when I first got it I thought it was missing parts. If I want just a pulse of light, which normally I do, I have it mounted just past the handguard of my rifle and I can easily push it with the tip of my finger. If I want constant on I can either hold it down or twist down the tail cap till the light cuts on and stays on. Simple and reliable with less to snag or break. If pressure switches work good for you then by all means use what you like. In my dumb opinion I think they are mostly a neat gimmick manufacturers use to justify prices. Which is funny, because the switches themselves are ridiculously inexpensive too.
 
Why do you think that rural areas are usually peaceful?
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Less people per square mile maybe? Some people live in heavily populated urban areas. It's just a fact of life that there will be more people of every kind in a crowded city neighborhood - including violent felons. It may not be practical (or even advisable) to patrol the streets looking for miscreants. Safer to stay in your home, defend your own, and mind your own business.
 
I like that motion-alarm/strobe unit. I think that would make a great deterrent, as well as wake you up if they made a quiet entry. The only upgrade it needs now is about a 4000 lumen bulb.
 
I've known people that not only heard that shotgun being racked...they saw it being racked. And were not intimidated. Now only a couple of them are still walking around, granted.

But that's not my point. My point is your mindset. Part of your mindset is that the confrontation will be avoided due to intimidating the opponent? In my opinion, that is not only a gamble, it's a dangerous gamble.

You are gambling that the intruder in your home is rational. That your attacker is rational. Excuse me? I would assert that no rational human being would be intruding into another's home or attacking them.

Another viewpoint is a paraphrase of the Hulk,"Please don't intimidate me. You wouldn't like me when I'm intimidated."

Loudly racking that shotgun will probably work. Probably. Remember, though, it's not the odds. It's the stakes. And you've just rolled the dice, given away your position, and given away the fact that you are armed and with what weapon.

In the game of scissors, rock, and paper the players act simultaneously. Try playing that game where you go first and then the other guy reacts to your play. You won't win. Ever.

Intruder in my house? My objective will be for him to know I am there and armed with whatever when I shoot him with it. If I got scissors, I don't want to give him a chance to use his rock.

Surely you've read of somebody being arrested with a hand grenade from time to time. You're assuming when you rack your shotgun to intimidate the intruder that he's not one of those guys who hasn't been caught with it.

Personally, that's not an assumption I'm willing to make.
 
People seem to assume they will be facing down a South American death squad in their living room. This seems unlikely.
The anecdotal evidence is that racking a shotgun deters people. Producing a weapon deters people. Criminals are generally not just dumb but lazy as well. They tend to take off when resistance is offered.
The "giving away your position" argument is dumb imo. If someone breaks in my house he will know exactly where I am--hunkered down behind the bed with a gun in one hand screaming into the phone with the other. He wants to walk in on that, go for it.
Anyone wanting to clear his house with a shotgun probably deserves whatever happens to him.
 
If the sound of a shotgun being racked deters the intruder, that's great - even if the perp leaves fecal matter behind :). That being said, whether the perp is discouraged or encouraged by the noise should be immaterial to your resolve to do whatever necessary to preserve your life.
 
Why make things harder/more complicated for yourself than you need to? Granted, there's not much to racking a shotgun, but if you manage to jack it up, which also isn't hard to do, you'll be in a not-good place.

In my opinion this is right up there with "Should I carry a round in the chamber of my CCW gun?" or "Should I carry my 1911 cocked & locked?" In both cases, assuming a quality weapon, the answer is & always will be YES! Same goes for "Should I have a round in the chamber of my shotgun?"

Why, oh why, in the wide world of sports would you ever rely on an intruder/attacker's willingness to wimp out?
 
In my opinion this is right up there with "Should I carry a round in the chamber of my CCW gun?" or "Should I carry my 1911 cocked & locked?" In both cases, assuming a quality weapon, the answer is & always will be YES! Same goes for "Should I have a round in the chamber of my shotgun?"
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Except that a) your ccw gun needs to be ready all the time you are carrying it; b) the shotgun does not have a firing pin block. If it falls over, gets hit, etc it stands a good chance of going off by itself.
 
Except that a) your ccw gun needs to be ready all the time you are carrying it; b) the shotgun does not have a firing pin block. If it falls over, gets hit, etc it stands a good chance of going off by itself.
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So you know you'll have plenty of time if someone breaks into your home? People never wake up with a stranger at their bedroom dooway huh?

If a gun is tipped over it's not going to go off unless it has a severe fault that makes it generally unsafe. Firing pin moves in a straight line, the only thing that'll cause it go bang if it is of reliable manufacture & in good repair is dropping it straight on the muzzle from a pretty decent height.
 
^I dunno about that. You ever hear about that one guy you tried to club his dog with his shotgun, whacked a rock instead, and ended up shooting himself in the gut? In a lot of these stories, it seems like it is usually somebody whacking the stock against something hard. Then again, these stories could be BS.
 
I think to go along with what Rainbowbob said about not everyone is not a lucky to live in......

I live right down the road from my county jail, doesn't mean that the police will get to my house faster, just means that's where the county wanted to put the jail.

Another thing to think about is that bad dudes are a different bread now a days. Just recently I had a knife pulled on me at my job while trying to stop a shop lifter. I am not a cop, I am an assistant manager at Walmart. This guy would have done anything to get away with the $44 in merch he had just stolen from us. The cops were on top of this whole thing, and caught the guy a few days later.

The every increasing population doesn't help either. I am not a racist, nor am I prejudice but there are some odd millions of people here that are illegal and out of that many people some of them are on the run from the law. These are the people that will find there way into your house, not able to speak English. What do you do? A simple rack of any gun lets them know you only speak English, and you are not in the mood to deal with them at present time. If he can not figure out that I am in fact asleep from the hours of 10 p.m. to 5:40 a.m. and he is not welcome because I didn't let him in, he is free game. I don't see him knowing where I am as being a big deal, unless I have not risen to the occasion before he got to my room. Remember when you rack the slide, thats letting them know I don't speak your language the next sound that follows, just might be the last you hear.
 
Hard data on home defense with or without a shotgun is difficult to obtain. Many people may frighten off an intruder and never notify the authorities about the incident. Still, the work of criminoligist Gary Kleck intrigues me. If he is correct, the sight of a weapon can dissuade a possible attack. This is an important topic for discussion and I suggest that those truly interested in this subject start with Kleck and others who have investigated the relationship between gun ownership and crime. If nothing else, it provides serious food for thought.


Timthinker
 
all my guns are great for home defense as in 9mm great round and hi cap. my bersa is 17+1 and kel tec is 33+1 but i don't keep the tec loaded you must unfold and rack the bolt. bersa is always loaded with JHP's 147 grain winchester's. i live in a complex so we always have someone watching over someone i don't think there has every bin a theft unless it was done by one of the members of the community.

heres a story my friend in MIA was sleeping and heard something he grabbed his mossberg went outside racked it and all you heard was a man screaming DON'T SHOOT I'M HIS COUSIN. i don't believe this bull about ppl not running off when a slide is racked or shotty most of the time if someone even hears the word gun or no less sees one there running with there tail between there legs unless they have one of course.
 
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If I get home invaded I won't be racking the slide on my shotguns. They live in the safe. There will be a small 'click' as I thumb the safety off my 1911 , loaded with boring old fashioned 230 grain ball.

If some social event makes me think I need to have more firepower than my .45 at hand it'll be my Bushmaster with 30 rounds - already "racked" , again just leaving me with that little feeble "click" as I thumb the safety over to "Fire."
 
"EVERYBODY speaks the language of shotgun."
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LoL!!

Soooo true....

The AVERAGE individual can surely benefit from racking the slide of ye olde trusty pump action shot gun. Why? Because it's an ODDS game. The ODDS of ever having your home broke into are what? Not too high, thankfully, depending on where you live. The ODDS of a criminal actually willing to stay and shoot it out are slim as well. MOST criminals will get the hell out of dodge once they are discovered OR when they hear that slide racking.

So what happens when you have the criminals in your house that defy those odds? That's on you.

Hope for the best and expect the worse.

I like the motion detector lights in the house idea, and imo, that alone would deter most criminals. Combine that with the racking sound of an 870 and I would be willing to bet that 90% of crooks would get out of dodge. As for the 10% that won't, well, sometimes you just have to fight...
 
Once upon a time, back when the earth was still cooling, I took the instructor course for the NRA's Personal Protection In The Home class. That particular class helps people plan and implement useful strategies and tactics to employ in their own homes, and with their own families, in the unlikely event an intruder or intruders appear.

It's a truism in the military that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy." Often enough it happens that way in normal everyday life too. "Life," as they say, "is what happens while you're making other plans."

The simple fact is, there's no way to plan what you will do when you are surprised. You can't cover all the angles, all the possibilities, the "What If" encyclopedia has no end to its volumes.

All you can do is the best you can.

What's the best you can do? Well, I think (FWIW) that starting your thinking with hardware is a bassackwards way to go about it. Of course, it should be clear how I think to anyone who bothers to read my SIG. Why I think that way might not be quite as easily accessible.

IMHO it all starts with mindset. I own my own mindset because I created it, refined it and personalized it. My mindset tells me that I have a right to continue living unmolested, to keep possession of the things I have worked to accumulate, to enjoy the peace and quiet of my own home and family. My mindset tells me that no one has a right to intrude themselves into my home unwanted and unwelcome. My mindset tells me that I have a right to resist such intrusion, and even a duty to resist such an intrusion, up to an including the use of deadly force to resist if necessary. My mindset tells me that the only way to make me stop resisting when resistance is justified is to disable or kill me. Fortunately the laws of my nation and my state are in concordance with my mindset. Mindset drives all else and provides the foundation upon which everything else must be built.

Skillset comes as a result of putting mindset to work through training and practice. Even a perfect mindset is useless if it cannot be translated into action when necessity presents itself- mindset without skillset is like a fully functional brain trapped in a paralyzed body. Training is necessary to learn the skills mindset depends upon. Practice is necessary to refine and hone those learned skills. There is no substitute for training and practice.

Toolset is a distant last on the list for a lot of reasons. Tools are the easiest to acquire, but without the proper foundation of mindset and skillset are the least useful. It might not take a lifetime of meditation, training and practice in order to successfully defend self and family- just last week I read about a woman in Missouri who had acquired a shotgun in the aftermath of a break-in and sexual assault.

Later when the man came back and broke in again, she killed him- apparently with the first shot she ever fired out of that shotgun. ( http://www.claytoncramer.com/gundefenseblog/blogger.html , Oct. 31, 2008, story datelined Cape Girardeau, Missouri, titled Cape Girardeau woman shoots, kills would-be rapist at her home)

We aren't told what kind of shotgun it was, what load she used, how much training she had or from what source. Whatever it was, it was sufficient in that situation.

Does that mean all anyone needs to do is go buy a shotgun, and learn how to load it and what to do to fire it? That's more of a slender reed than I would be comfortable relying on, YMMV however. But it does demonstrate that at least some of the time, effective self defense with a firearm is possible under less than ideal circumstances. I would prefer that anyone who is about to undertake self defense with a firearm have full confidence in the firearm and in their ability to use it effectively- and that takes training and practice IMHO.

There are already enough stories out there, like the very next one in Clayton Cramer's list after the one cited above- the one titled Watauga homeowner stabbed, shot with own gun during robbery.

Once again, for the record:

http://www.nrahq.org/education/training/basictraining.asp to locate an NRA certified instructor teaching the Personal Protection In The Home class near you

http://materials.nrahq.org/go/product.aspx?productid=ES 26840 to order the PPITH class on video

http://www.nrastore.com/nra/Product.aspx?productid=PB+01781 to order the PPITH textbook

http://www.paladin-press.com/product/129/73 to order a copy of Louis Awerbuck's Safe At Home DVD

lpl
 
I still don't know what kind of shotgun it was. Might have been a single shot, or a double barrel. Whatever it was, she made it work when the chips were down, and that's what matters.

lpl
 
Warnings?

So I hear all kinds of things about what I would do if they get in the house....what about before they get in the house? I have 5 labradors usually 3 or 4 sleep in the house at all times. They are a pretty good warning device. NO one get's through our door without them raising some racket. I would think a dog doesn't matter what kind that would let a few barks out if someone comes around would do just as good or more than the 870.
Granted my quail gun just happens to be an 870 within reach of the bed and yes it's loaded. I just figure with the dogs odds are I'm not going to have to use it. Someone rattles my door knob I'm going to know about and whoever is doing the rattling is going to be thinking twice I'm betting. So anyone want to buy a lab pup? lol.
 
When it comes to CCW in public I am very conservative, I would only draw on an armed threat in a last ditch defensive move.

But if someone breaks in my house, There will be no "warning" from the slide racking. I will mount a discrete offensive attack.

If you warn an intruder with your shotgun slide, likely they will leave. But they will case your home and be back when you are not there.

With home invasion you can be on the offense and not face legal repercussions.
 
Someone ought to make a strobe grenade. Chuckable device with multiple high-power LEDs recessed into the surface. After being turned on, anything that gives it more than a minor bump will cause it to start flashing. Would make a great distraction: dazzle the bad guy while drawing his attention away from you.
 
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