In Self Defense Podcast 117: Tom Givens on Home Defense: Part 2:

Rangemaster founder Tom Gives talks to Don, Steve, and Shawn about having a home defense plan so you know what to do if an intruder ever enters your home.

 

 

Shawn Vincent:

Hey everybody, it’s Shawn Vincent. Thanks for listening to the podcast today. Today’s part two of our conversation with Tom Givens. If you listened last time, you know Tom Givens is the founder of Tac-Con. He’s a veteran of law enforcement. He’s good friends with our own Steve Moses. Tom told us last time about the rising occurrence of armed burglaries. That’s home invasions, what armed defenders should do to prepare themselves for that potential threat. Last time we talked extensively about types of gear that you can buy to harden your home as a target for an armed defender, to give yourself more time to assess the threat and more time to execute your self-defense plan.

In today’s conversation, we’re going to talk more about executing that plan. We’re going to talk about the armed defender’s dilemma, how to deal with a threat at your front door. We’re going to talk about adopting the right mindset as a home defender so that you don’t make mistakes that could get you into legal peril. And then we’re going to talk about what to do, if despite your best efforts at hardening your perimeter and bolstering your security, someone still gets in and poses a threat to you or your family. Here’s our conversation with Tom Givens. Thanks for listening.

So Tom, I’m curious to ask you, this is one of the armed home defenders dilemmas that we encounter a lot … We see a lot of mistakes made at the front door of a house. We have a case out of Hawaii where a sailor about to ship out, got drunk, got dropped off at the wrong townhouse, three doors down from his. He’s trying to get in. He’s yelling to let him in. The father freaks out after a while and puts a round through the door, kills the guy. We have another case, the Ted Wafer case, where it’s a drunk teenager who got lost, and was hurt, and high, and showed up at his door pounding. He opened the door, a mistake. He said she tried to push through his screen and he pulled the trigger on his shotgun and blew her head off. We have the Charles Dorsey case that we told you about where the drunk neighbor’s friend was pounding. He got through the door. This is a better result for the defender in this case because he wasn’t charged. He never fired until he got through that door, and it was found to be justified, but also a terrible tragedy. And Steve introduced to us in that case, the idea of the hard corner, that the defender didn’t need to be standing right there by the door. He could have gone to a more defensible place, deeper in the house, had the chance to issue voice commands if he needed to, and been prepared to disambiguate the person’s intention if they came deeper. What’s your experience with that?

Tom Givens:

Well, I agree completely, that the most important thing anybody could do with this is to have a few of what we call pre-made decisions. If somebody does this, I’m going to do that. They do this, I’m going to do that. So you don’t have to figure this out while your fat’s in the fire. And if one of the things you’re concerned about is somebody breaching your front door, for instance, well, why in the hell would you go to the front door then? You have identified that as the problem. So don’t go to the problem. Okay? The entire purpose of a firearm is so that you don’t have to close with somebody and hack and slash and smash on each other until one of you gives in. Instead of having to hand deliver violence, we can air mail it. So instead of being at the door, get the hell away from the door. Get back away from it. If you perceive that to be the deadly threat, get somewhere else that you can cover that door from a distance and use the firearm for what it’s for. Then if somebody actually comes through the door, you’re set up to deal with it. Don’t go out, that’s silly. You’ve given up all of your advantages when you do that, make them come in.

Shawn Vincent:

And not just your tactical advantages, Tom, but your legal protections of the Castle Doctrine, because now if you’ve gone to the fight, it’s harder to make the case that you were in fear for your life because you voluntarily left the place of relative safety, Don, to go meet a threat.

Tom Givens:

No good is ever going to come from selling boldly forth to do battle with the forces of evil. That’s just a fantasy. Stay in the house, make them come to you. And as we said, you cited several cases where it’s a drunk, delivery people, kids, you can’t shoot people for ringing your doorbell or beating on your door, but you can call the cops and have them come get them off your porch while you’re in the house safe and secure, everything’s fine. But if somebody breaches that door, then that’s a different ballgame altogether. To me, that manifests intent right there. The fact that they’ve breached the door, they’ve had to forcibly break, and again, it goes back to having a decent frame, a decent lock — make it where somebody can’t just walk up and flip your door open with a finger. And if somebody actually breaks down a door to get in, you’ve got a reasonable case to say, well, I need to shoot the guy.

Shawn Vincent:

We couldn’t have known this when we scheduled this podcast weeks ago, but over this last weekend from when we’re recording this, the shooting of Ralph Yarl made the national headlines. And there was an 84-year-old man who was home. Ralph went to the wrong door. He was a block away from where he thought he was picking up his siblings, and he rang the doorbell, was hanging around because no one was answering, but he felt sure that’s where the kids were. And the old man who I think he expressed that this kid’s a teenager, he was bigger than him, and he’s an old guy who’s not as fit as he used to be, and he may have felt some genuine fear. And I don’t know what the crime was like in that neighborhood or what his experiences had been, but the kid was behind a glass door and he fired through that glass door, struck him twice. And to your point, if he had just left the deadbolt shut, never opened the door, called 9-1-1, and waited to see, if he was going to make an attempt to breach it, his whole life would be different now. Ralph’s life would be different now and a tragedy would’ve been prevented.

Tom Givens:

Yeah, yeah. Don’t be in such a damn hurry to shoot people. Oh, you can’t shoot people for standing on your porch. You’d think everybody would know that by this point, but that’s a common misconception. Well, it’s my property. Well, yeah.

Shawn Vincent:

For pulling up into your driveway, like the New York case, you can’t.

Tom Givens:

Claude Werner collects dozens of these, where idiots go outside because they think somebody’s rifling in their car. And the guy runs off and they fling a shot at them. They’re always just baffled when the cops show up and arrest him. “But it’s my car.” “Yes, sir.” “But it’s my stuff.” “Yes, sir. But you’re under arrest for aggravated assault.” Unless you actually hit the guy, in which case it’s to be a homicide. And they’re just baffled, “But it’s my stuff,” but your stuff is not worth the life. Whether you like that or not, I don’t care if you like-

Shawn Vincent:

Yeah, that’s tough. That’s a tough one. And maybe we take another minute to talk about that because, Don, you and I have encountered, even personally, cases where people have gone out to encounter someone who’d pulled up into a driveway and was sitting there in the car, or had otherwise been suspiciously snooping on the property. This George Allen Kelly Case out of Arizona or New Mexico, I can’t remember which one it was, but he’s right there on the border. And people were crossing his land and he fired at them. We call it “prairie justice” sometimes. I think there’s a sense that sort of cosmically, there’s some justification in defending your property, but even the armed defenders who realize, after the fact they’ve used deadly force for the protection of property, just from their statements to police, they start equivocating. They start realizing that they understand in their hearts that really they needed to be in real danger to justify that use of force, especially people who come to face a dead body that’s a result of their own actions. They feel differently about the result when it’s real and visceral in front of them than the idea of some sense of justice. Steve was calling it, in the George Allen Kelly Podcast, an “impulse” that is very visceral and very real. That impulse is justified, but acting on it is where people get themselves into trouble. And I guess we can’t say enough, it’s not legally justified to use deadly force to defend your property unless it’s arson or something that might cause real harm to somebody.

Tom Givens:

In the case of arson, you’re not defending the property, you’re defending your people inside the property.

Shawn Vincent:

Defending the people in the house. Right, exactly.

Tom Givens:

House burns down on you. It’s not that they burned down your house, it’s that they burned down the house on you. That’s the thing. It’s actually an instinctive thing, especially among males, it’s just territorial response. This is mine, you can’t come on it, whether you’re a bullfrog or a bull, no male creature likes something to encroach on this territory; he’ll fight them over that. And unfortunately, we have to keep that in mind and remind ourselves, yeah, but that’s not legal.

Shawn Vincent:

When you were in law enforcement, was there training? I know police officers, they get that sense too when they’re hurt by somebody or something egregious happens, there’s this impulse that comes. You’re trained to deal with that, right?

Tom Givens:

No. If you weren’t, there’d be a lot of people who didn’t get taken into custody alive.

Shawn Vincent:

Is there advice you have for folks on how to recognize that when they’re in a stressful situation?

Tom Givens:

Yeah, just remind yourself it’s just stuff. The insurance company will buy you more stuff. They can’t buy you more time. You spend 10 years in prison, the insurance company can’t give you that back. They steal some crap out of your car, the insurance company will replace it. Then if it’s valuable, crap, don’t leave it in the car. Dumb ass.

Shawn Vincent:

Yeah, we’ve heard that advice before. Don’t keep anything in your car that’s so valuable that you’d be willing to shoot someone for it. Steve, what’d you have to say there?

Tom Givens:

Actually, “Am I willing to kill somebody over this?” If you are, get it in the damn house.

Steve Moses:

Well, I think a good thing maybe to go ahead and just make that part of your plan, when you deal with people is to understand that you may feel that impulse and you make the decision right now that you won’t succumb to it. And so it’s like, “Hey, I know I’m probably going to feel this way. I’m not going to succumb to it.” And if you have that in place, I would hope and think that maybe it might cause some people to just bite their tongue and refrain from doing what they’re very tempted to do.

Tom Givens:

Pre-made decisions are absolutely critical. If you’ve never thought about it before, you’ve got to make that decision on the spur of the moment with the emotional input. Whereas if you’ve thought it before and already made that decision now, if does that, I’m not going to be able to reach my gun.

Shawn Vincent:

In this next segment, we’re going to talk to Tom about the male defender’s perspective. That’s the idea that men, fellows out there, we can tend to get a little territorial and that can cause us to make mistakes in using our firearm before we face an imminent threat of bodily harm or death. You can’t use your firearm to protect property, it’s to protect you and your family. Here’s more from Tom.

Shawn Vincent: 

Tom, one of the articles that I sent you, the one where the three armed guys came in, stole $20,000 that the homeowner had in the safe and his two puppy English bulldogs. Right? And a funny little line at the very end of that article, the homeowner said, “I hope they come back.” And what he meant by that is he’ll be ready for them next time. And if somebody else breaks into his house, I believe those people are going to die. But it also puts him in a real dangerous spot from a mindset perspective. Because Ted Wafer, who shot that teenager who opened up the front door, a few weeks beforehand, a gang of kids had broken into his car and he was on edge. And I think he felt like “That’s not going to happen to me again!” and that caused him to be more reckless when Ranisha McBride showed up at his house.

There’s this guy, Marcus Karma from Missoula, Montana, someone had stolen some valuables and some money from his garage that he kept unlocked and open a little bit at night. And he was telling people all over town, he hoped they’d come back to the point where he left it open on purpose and staged a purse there hoping that they’d come back, thinking he’d be able to use the cover of the Castle Doctrine to shoot them. George Allen Kelly wrote a self-published book he put on Amazon, where he described a circumstance where he would shoot an illegal migrant on his own property. Even another case to show you how common this is, Byron David Smith from Minnesota, he had had some irreplaceable family heirlooms stolen. And then he made it look as if he weren’t home on one Thanksgiving Day. And essentially when these two teenagers, which he had seen on cameras he mounted around his house, broke in through a window. He waited for them in the basement and essentially executed them there and turned what would’ve been a justified self-defense shooting into a horrific murder.

But I suspect when you’re giving us these stats on the invasions, that some people live in places where the invasions are more common and they may experience multiple attempts in their lives for someone to enter their house and they’re going to be informed by their previous experiences.

Tom Givens:

It just boils down to they’ll make it hard enough to get in that somebody has to make an actual effort at it and show some actual intent to harm you. Thereby don’t go outside over crap in your car. Don’t leave your garage door up so that then you got to chase people for sealing your tools. Just remove the opportunity. Most criminals are opportunistic. If you remove the opportunity, you don’t have problems with them.

Don West:

Some of it though, is mindset, I have to think. When I start looking at all these cases, and from the male perspective, I know that’s stereotypical, but from the male perspective, ego gets involved and the cockfighting stuff gets involved. And pretty soon you might have someone who’s not well-trained, hasn’t thought through any of this stuff. Doesn’t have the pre-made decision that makes the panic response that causes them not to have assessed the situation, not to have taken precautions, and then shoots out of panic under circumstances where the jury may very well find it was unreasonable. There was maybe some semblance of a threat, but it was an unreasonable response to that threat. Then you get the other end of that spectrum that I was alluding to, where it’s almost similar to a road rage instance where there’s not even a profit motive of some sort.

You just got these guys that butt heads and then all of a sudden they just mutually escalate to the point that somebody pulls a gun, somebody gets killed. And I often wonder, especially from your background in law enforcement experience, what’s going on in their head? What are they trying to gain out of it? Is it as simple as they want to be proven right and more powerful, they want to win the argument?

Tom Givens:

Yeah, basically just become the alpha male.

Don West:

You put that back in the house, where you’ve got somebody that’s quick on the trigger, not necessarily because they in fact, truly believe that they are facing imminent threat of great bodily harm or death. And they may have a legal justification because of the context of it being in their house, but they’re just outraged at the behavior of someone that would dare try to take their stuff or try to do something to them. And the emotion overwhelms the judgment.

Shawn Vincent:

Don, you mentioned the male perspective. So we’ve looked at cases like Melinda Herman, when she saw the guy running up the yard with the crowbar, she went and hid behind other locked doors. And when that guy breached those doors, then she put a bunch of lead in his face. And we looked at a case out of Cincinnati, where a single mother with several children, her estranged boyfriend or husband was trying to break in, and she put up with it until he ripped the window unit out of a window, the air conditioner window unit out of window and started crawling in and then she shot him. And the prosecutor there praised her for her courage.

And even Charles Dorsey, when his neighbor’s drunk friend was pounding on his door, the Ring camera recorded her saying, “Don’t go outside.” There was a very good chance that Charles Dorsey makes a mistake of going outside and is convicted of something now, or at least charged with something now instead of being not convicted or charged because he listened to his wife. So there’s a real strong argument in this home defense stuff for male armed defenders to ask, “What would my wife do?” before doing something rash.

Tom Givens:

I like that. Just the best generic advice is just don’t go outside, make them come to you. Make them-

Shawn Vincent:

Make them come to you.

Tom Givens:

Make them actually breach the door. The defender has a huge advantage there. The military, the adage is anybody trying to take a position that needs a three to one numerical superiority over the defender. Because the defender has all of the advantages, has a good transposition, good field of fire, protection from incoming rounds, and the whole bit that the attacker doesn’t have. And the same thing applies in the home defense scenario. Just think of it as a battle, and you should control that battle space long before the battle actually happens. You should have hardened points. You should know where your corners are, where you can cover doorways. There’s no reason in the world to go to the doorway, the doorway’s the source of your problem. So get back somewhere in a corner and cover it. If somebody comes through it, you dominate that space.

The instant you go outside, you’ve given up every advantage you’ve possibly ever had, as I said, both tactically and legally. So make them come to you. And for example, just this most recent case we’re talking about, guy knocks on the door, is standing on the porch, and is shot through the door. There’s just no way to justify that. That could have been a UPS driver, it could have been a meter reader, could have been the cops, could have been the firemen coming to tell you the house next door is on fire. I have woken people up in the middle of the night to tell them, the house next door is on fire, the firemen would like you to move. I don’t want to get shot for that.

Shawn Vincent:

Much of our conversation. So far it’s been about hardening your perimeter to buy yourself time to assess a threat in the case of a potential home invasion, and to be ready to defend yourself successfully. Steve asked Tom about his advice on what do you do, once, despite all your best efforts, someone’s breached the house and now it’s time to put up or shut up. Tom says something I like. He says, “Get up, get your gear, get a plan, and get moving.”

Steve Moses:

Oh, what I’d like to do maybe is get Tom’s take, however, on those persons that are breaking that through the door, they’re using violence, or maybe they used ruse just to get the door open and then forced themselves in, in a very violent manner and where they were threatening violence. Because I think we’ve done probably a pretty good job of talking about, okay, here’s a situation when maybe I have an opportunity to make some good decisions about how I want to handle this, as opposed to the exposure that people don’t realize they may have to someone that has come in through that door really hard with just serious violent criminal intent.

Tom Givens:

Oh. What’s the question in that?

Steve Moses:

Well, the question is more or less is, I think we’ve done a lot about talking about making good decisions and not shooting somebody that does not need to be shot. But by the same token, you’ve cited some really interesting cases, and when I say interesting, I’ll say tragic cases in which these people came in hard and people were raped, people died, people were shot.

Shawn Vincent:

So how do you transition to action when it’s clear that the intruder’s intentions are malevolent?

Tom Givens:

It’s actually pretty simple. If they kick the door in and they see you and they turn around and run off, that’s a profit burglar. If they kick the door and they see you and they rub their hands together, that’s an expressive burglar, he’s there for you. The fact that he didn’t run off means that he’s the type that’s there to do harm to you, otherwise he would’ve left. So that’s pretty much the entire distinction right there.

Shawn Vincent:

And so now you need the time and space to properly use your firearm, if you’ve made that decision.

Tom Givens:

Yeah, that’s why you stay back away from the door, get to a hard corner, cover the entryway. If you get all your family in … if you’re in a two-story house, for instance, if everybody’s on the second floor, all you got to do is go prone on the floor and cover the stairway. Somebody looking up the stairway, can’t see anything but an eyeball and a gun muzzle. And they can’t get upstairs, but that one way. So you made your problem simple and you made his hard. So just something as simple as that or somebody’s kicking on the front door, go to the furthest corner from that door that you could still see it from and cover it. Make them come through it and advance into the home despite you saying, “Stop, go away. I’m armed. Don’t come any closer.” Boom. You’ve done everything you can to avoid shooting somebody at that point rather than facilitating it.

Don West:

Tom, are you suggesting voice commands in the home, a home that’s been physically breached?

Tom Givens:

Only if it’s feasible. If you’re behind cover somewhere, the guy doesn’t even know where you are, you’ve got an opportunity for a challenge at that point. If on the other hand, three people were pouring through the door with guns in their hands, you may not have time to say anything except “boom, boom, boom, stop that.” It’s always-

Tom Givens:

The answer to every tactical question is always, “it depends.”

Don West:

It seems really evident though based on what you’re saying, that the big, big, big difference is if they come through the door and they see you and they try to get away let them go. Let them go. Don’t chase after them. Shut the door and call the police.

Shawn Vincent:

To that point, there’s only two instances that we’ve seen in all the cases that we’ve explored where somebody broke into a house and the homeowner shot them or shot at them and got into some legal trouble. And one of those cases is when after the intruder  has been incapacitated in some way, the homeowners “finished them off.” And the other is when they’ve actually driven the intruder away and they chase them and shoot them in the back, or shoot them out on the yard in some other location. Like you say, Tom, it all depends. And we’re finding lessons from cases, we’re not giving legal advice on this podcast. But our experience from the cases we’ve seen is if you only fire until you’ve eliminated the threat, for someone who’s forcefully broken into your house, we don’t see those guys and gals get into trouble. And if you don’t chase someone out of your house and shoot them in the back or chase them down, and instead be a good witness, lock the doors, and find someplace safe until police arrive, those folks don’t get into trouble either.

Tom Givens:

What we want them to do is go away. So if they’re going away, don’t impede that in any way. Don’t try to catch them. Don’t chase them. Our entire goal is for them to go away. In fact, since I’m not in the job anymore, my command, if I pull my gun, is always, “Go away,” because that’s what I want them to do.

Shawn Vincent:

Steve, is there anything we didn’t touch that you wanted to have Tom talk about?

Steve Moses:

Yeah, I think so, and this is one of the things that was really driven home to me during Tom’s presentation at Tac-Con, is that in some of these instances, if you are not prepared to defend yourself very, very quickly, you’ll never make it to that hard corner. You really need to, in a lot of instances, you need to make it so it’s so difficult that someone’s going to have a very hard time to get in. And if they do get, in my opinion, regardless of where you are, you probably need to be prepared to defend yourself. And I think a big part of that is if you feel like that’s indeed something that can happen is to either have a firearm in close proximity or even on your person.

Tom Givens:

Yeah. It’s really hard to get across to people when we say these things happen really quickly, it’s really hard to get across them. The problem is both types of burglars, once they gain entry go directly toward the master bedroom more often than anywhere else. The profit-motivated burglars headed there because that’s where everybody stores guns, cameras, credit cards, cell phones, and jewelry, which is what the profit-motivated burglary is there for. And the expressive burglar goes there because he’s after you. And at three in the morning, that’s where you’re going to be, you’re going to be in the master bedroom. So in either case, come in a breached door to your master bedroom, it’s going to be seconds, not minutes, seconds. This is why hardening the exterior is so important. If it takes them a minute, minute and a half to breach the door, you’ve had ample time to mount a defense, get up, get gear, get a plan, get moving.

But if they breach the door on the first try, we’re talking about literally seconds before the guy is in your master bedroom because that’s where they’re headed. An awful lot of injuries occur when the homeowners coming out of the master bedroom and the bad guys are heading into the master bedroom and they more or less collide and have a big tangled fight. And this is why your perimeter is so absolutely critical. It’s got to make noise. The two things we want it to do is make noise and take time. Noise alerts you and the rest of the family and time gives you the opportunity to get your stuff.

Now, you’re not going to wear a pistol to bed most of the time. So at three in the morning, you’re going to have to get one okay, or your shotgun, or whatever your preferred home defense weapon is. But the point is you’re going to have to get it, that takes time. So we’ve got to delay them at the perimeter long enough to be able to get up. I’m one of those people who wakes up instantly. If I’m asleep and you ask me a question, I’ll answer it, but that means I never get any good sleep either.

Shawn Vincent:

We don’t talk a lot about gear on this show, but since part one, we talked a lot about the types of security gear you can buy that might help you keep an intruder or delay an intruder from getting in your house. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk to Tom about what kind of weapon he prefers for home defense and what armed defenders might think about when they choose the weapon that’s right for them. Before we wrap up, Tom, and since I got you and Steve on the line, I’d love to ask a gear question because you talked about your preferred firearm for home defense, right? 

I have to remark that this Andrew Lesser who shot the kid out the front door, shot him with a .32 revolver in the face, and in the arm. And that kid ran to three different houses in the neighborhood looking for help. Melinda Herman shot her intruder with a five-shot .38 revolver, hit him four times in the face and neck, and the guy was able to leave the house, get in his van, and crash it into a tree in a different neighborhood. There’s not a lot of stopping power there. And Don, we’ve encountered cases where intruders have been shot and almost laugh it off and continue the attack. So is there any lesson here for if you’re concerned about stopping someone who’s so hopped up that they’re going to bust through your door in the middle of the night and knowing they’re going to have a confrontation?

Tom Givens:

Absolutely. The only reason we carry pistols is because if I walk into the bank with a shotgun over my arm it causes consternation. So walk into the Walmart with a rifle, it really bothers people. But I go to both those places with a pistol and nobody’s bothered because nobody knows I’ve got one. I never, ever go anywhere without a handgun, but that’s because nobody knows that I’ve got it, it doesn’t bother them. There are very few places you can do that with long gun. So that’s really the only advantage of the handgun. At home, you’re not concerned about concealing it. So my go-to gun is a 14-inch 12 gauge, five rounds of buckshot in it. My home is perfectly designed for this. If I step out of my second-floor bedroom I’m on a catwalk, the front door is one direction, the back door is the other direction, and I’m up above you with a 12 gauge, and that’s not a good place to be.

Shawn Vincent:

Since we’re talking about that too, I also want to talk about the ammunition because I encountered a case recently where these guys broke into somebody’s townhouse apartment through the sliding glass door. And this guy killed the intruders, but a couple of rounds actually went through the wall and struck very near where the neighbor usually sits and watches television. In a different circumstance, he could have killed his neighbor while defending his home. Buckshot, I imagine, doesn’t travel very far once it’s hit some solid barriers. Is that a consideration for an armed home defender?

Tom Givens:

Yeah, it is. And to be honest, a decent terminal ballistics discussion’s going to take a couple of hours, not a couple of minutes.

Shawn Vincent:

Fair enough.

Tom Givens:

What I’m concerned about is somebody is determined enough to defeat metal doors and deadbolt locks and still get into the house, that’s somebody that needs to be put down right now. And nothing beats a 12 gauge for lightly clothed, unarmed people at close range, which is what, typically, you’re going to be dealing with.

Steve Moses:

Yeah. Something I might add also, Shawn, on that is that each armed homeowner needs to take into consideration the layout of their own home, understand that if you’ve got a sheetrock wall between you and your kids’ room, or you’ve got a lot of glass windows in the front of the house, that you don’t have the luxury of missing, which is something that Tom preaches very fervently in all of the classes. Not only because as he might say, you’re wasting time with misses, but the fact that those rounds are going to land somewhere.

Tom Givens:

Yes.

Steve Moses:

So it’s really important that you understand what the problem might look like and how you’re going to deal with it, and understand areas of vulnerability that if you put a round in that direction and you miss it may cause big problems for you and someone else.

Shawn Vincent:

And if your plan is to, in advance, choose the place where you want to defend your home if somebody breaks in, part of that consideration is what’s down range, and is that going to stop the bullet without hurting somebody else.

Tom Givens:

Yeah. If it won’t go through multiple drywalls, it won’t penetrate deeply enough into a human to create any actual damage. So if it’s a viable defensive weapon, you’re simply going to have to hit the person with it, not just spray rounds in their general direction. The only safe backstops going to be the bad guy.

Shawn Vincent:

Don, is there anything that struck you from this conversation or anything else you wanted to ask Tom?

Don West:

A lot of it struck me just because of how valuable, how insightful, and very practical this advice is. If people would just stop and think about it for a minute, they don’t have to have extensive training to figure out what they can do to make their homes more impenetrable. It’s pretty much common sense, and you can get the guidance, no doubt anywhere, just by looking around for it, talking to people. How do I make my door stronger? Well, we learned that today. We know how deep the screws have to go in if you don’t have a metal doorframe, that’s so practical. And the value of cameras, on the other hand, that certain things that we might once have thought were very much a deterrent aren’t necessarily. And how something as clear in your objective as making your house harder to get in, which gives you the time to make yourself safe inside. The decision making, if somebody comes in forcibly not caring, whether they make a noise or not, just blasting the door down, or smashing windows and coming in, that’s already told you a lot about their intent.

And that’s really what you try to figure out, isn’t it, what the intent is? Is it somebody knocking on the door because they’re lost or drunk? Or is it somebody that’s knocking on the door to see if you’re not home so they can break in and steal your watch? Or is it somebody pounding and smashing their way in because they have you in their sights? So Tom, that’s so, so helpful. Thank you, I really appreciate it.

Tom Givens:

You’re welcome. Let me point out one last thing, and then I’ll stop this mess. We’re talking about preparation, not paranoia. In 2017, there were 126 million households in the United States, that’s houses, and apartments, condos all put together, 126 million households, that were 3.7 million burglaries, that’s one for every 34 households. So we’re not talking about something that’s rare. You’re not talking about something that’s not even likely, 1 in 34. If there were a disease that affected 1 in every 34 people, there’d be a telephone every other night about it. But there’s a burglary for every 34 homes every year, and that’s a single year, it’s not a lifetime. So it’s not being paranoid. It takes some reasonable, simple, in most cases, inexpensive precautions against a known threat that is a one in three dozen possibility.

Don West:

Tom, though, you might be able to help secure your house with some common sense and the advice of the guy at the Home Depot, but that guy can’t help you defend yourself once they breach the door. So that’s a different kind of training and preparation.

Tom Givens:

You’re definitely on your own at that point. Response times are up around 15 to 20 minutes in most cities now and the burglary is going to be long over with before that. In fact, I’ve got some 9-1-1 tape that would just curl your hair of people being murdered while talking to the dispatcher because the cops can’t materialize next to you when you call them. And hitting three buttons on your phone doesn’t freeze the action. If you think somebody’s going to come from somewhere else to your home in time to save you in a home invasion you’re out of your mind.

Shawn Vincent:

All right friends, that’s the podcast for today. Thanks for listening through to the end. Love having Tom on the show. We’ll have him back soon. Currently, I’m working on our first video podcast, so that’s something that you can look forward to. Until then, be smart, stay safe, take care.