In Self Defense Podcast 116: Tom Givens on Home Defense: Part 1

Rangemaster founder Tom Givens talks to Don West, Steve Moses, and Shawn Vincent about how security devices might not keep a motivated intruder out of your house, they can give you warning and buy you time to mount a defense. 

 

Shawn Vincent:

Hey everybody, it’s Shawn Vincent. Thanks for listening in to the podcast today. Today, I’m joined by our friend Tom Givens. He’s been on the podcast before. If you don’t know him, you should. Steve Moses, our own CCW Safe contributor, our friend, and firearms instructor. He’s been long time friends with Tom. He’s taken dozens and dozens of courses with Tom, holds him in the highest regard. We’re lucky to have him on the show today. During Tac-Con this year, that’s an annual conference that Tom founded, oh gosh, more than a quarter a century ago, I think, he talked about the rising occurrence of home invasions. That’s armed intruders coming into a house. It’s a home defender’s worst nightmare. He’s going to give us some stats on what the state of that rising problem is.

We’re going to talk about some strategies on how to keep intruders out of your home to buy you some time to assess the situation and make your self-defense plan. And on our part two of our conversation, which will be a separate podcast, we’ll talk about strategies for going live when those other preparations have failed to keep them out. Let’s get right into it. Here’s my conversation with Don West, Steve Moses, and our guest, Tom Givens.

Shawn Vincent:

Well, Tom, welcome back to the show. We’re grateful you made some time for us. You’ve had a busy season, I understand.

Tom Givens:

Yeah, we just finished up the annual tactical conference a few weeks ago and about to head back to Texas in a few days. I really ought to just stay there.

Shawn Vincent:

And if I heard right, the tickets for Tac-Con this year sold out faster than a Taylor Swift concert, right?

Tom Givens:

Yeah, this year’s event sold out last year in three days. And we announced this year’s, announced the 2024 event a few days ago, and it sold out in 11 and a half hours.

Shawn Vincent:

For any of our listeners who don’t know who you are, you’re the founder of the Rangemaster Institute, and out of that came the Rangemaster Tactical Conference, better known as Tac-Con. What for folks who don’t know Tac-Con, what’s it all about? What’s the experience like?

Tom Givens:

Well, it’s an annual event we’ve been putting on for 26 years now. For the last couple years and the foreseeable future, we’re at the Dallas Pistol Club in Dallas, which has a very nice, very expansive training facility there with nine or 10 live fire ranges. And we put up three classrooms and nice grassy area for the impact weapons and combat casualty care training and whatnot, all the hands-on type stuff, do the live fire on the various ranges scattered over the property, and use one permanent classroom and a couple of, wedding tents would be a good way to describe them, I guess. Very large tents that seat about a hundred people for a lot of the classroom work. This year we had 43 nationally recognized trainers teaching everything from legal issues to combat medicine tactics, history of modern firearms training, home invasions. And in the live fire stuff, had a huge variety of trainers doing everything from snub-nose pistols to modern electronic sight use and everything in between.

Several female instructors, including Luann Hamlin, and just about everybody that’s anybody is either a presenter there or shows up and takes part in it. We had about 400 attendees from literally, I think we had every state in the US represented this year.

Shawn Vincent:

And when you say everyone and anyone, that includes our own Steve Moses if I’m not mistaken. Steve, you’ve been involved with Rangemaster for how long?

Steve Moses:

Well, I actually met Tom in 1999. I think I took my first course from him in 2000. I think, Tom, you may correct me, I think I’ve taken a course from you every year since then. At least one course, in some instances, several courses. So he is one of those people that I’m never going to catch up with. And even when I feel like, okay, I’ve kind of gained in my knowledge and abilities, well, so has he, so I can’t close that gap. I was thinking about that. I’ve been, I believe now to 20 of those. I just missed one year because of a death in a family and it just gets better every year. And this year was no exception.

Tom Givens:

Yeah, it went off real well. We put a little over 200,000 rounds down range in three days in the live fire portions, plus all of the classroom and hands-on training. It’s the largest event of its type. And as I said, we’ve been doing it for 27 years. So the other similar conferences are pretty much based on what we’ve been doing for over a quarter of a century.

Shawn Vincent:

Tom tells us that every year in America there’s more than 1 million burglaries of occupied homes. He’s going to tell us the difference between a burglary and a home invasion and a robbery. And he’s going to tell us about a distinction between profit motivated burglars and expressive burglars, which is something I hadn’t heard before. Here’s more of our conversation with Tom.

Shawn Vincent:

Steve, when you came back from Tac-Con this year, you were very excited about a presentation Tom gave. Can you tell us a little bit about that presentation and what made you interested in it?

Steve Moses:

Well, first of all, Tom was teaching it. Second of all, it was on home invasions. And this is something that we have covered on more than one occasion in prior CCW Safe podcasts. So I went in there and I go, okay, I’m going to learn some stuff here. It’s going to be something that’s either useful for me directly in terms of something I might deal with, or it’s going to be something that perhaps I can share with some of our students and our audience. And I tell you what, my expectations were greatly exceeded. It was a phenomenal presentation, great PowerPoint presentation. And I actually learned a great deal to the extent that, that night, or actually, I guess it was Sunday night when I was driving home, I was actually thinking about the presentation. And one of the things that I thought was concerning was the fact that more and more we’re seeing home invasions that are not basically, for lack of a better term, bad guys on bad guys, drug guys hitting drug houses, stealing money, that kind of stuff.

A lot of it is happening in upper middle class, upper class, middle class homes where people are breaking in. Their intent is not to commit a burglary, which can be if they come into your house, and it’s not an intent to confront you. It’s typically called, at least in Oklahoma, it was a first-degree burglary. These people are looking to make contact with the people whom they are victimizing, and the reasons they do that may vary, but it was very, very scary. And some of the cases that he talked about, just the mayhem and violence that was visited on the homeowners was just extremely graphic and disturbing. So I’m just going to turn it over to Tom.

Shawn Vincent:

Yeah, and before we go there, I just wanted to mention, Steve, you told me about this topic and I was like, my assumption was that most home invasions were people raiding drug houses, bad guys on bad guys. We knew there’s money there, we know there’s drugs there, and then they come in. But then I just yesterday looked up home invasions on in the Google News search and was shocked at how many home invasion stories had been reported just in the last 15 hours. And they weren’t drug houses, they were armed thugs going in and roughing up old ladies and elderly couples, people who were vulnerable and who these criminals thought would be a pushover. And to your point, the difference between a burglary and an armed robbery home invasion — so frequently they have zip ties on them. They’ve come in with the intent to restrain somebody and under force. Tom, I think that’s a great place for you to give us the benefit of your experience.

Tom Givens:

I’ll jump right in then. Yeah, back when I was doing patrol work in the seventies and eighties, most home invasions were hostile takeovers by rival pharmaceutical retailers, that you pretty much figure if somebody had a violent home invasion, it was because they were thought to have a stash of dope or money or both in their home. But that’s 50 years ago, that’s not today. Today, it’s everybody. As you mentioned a minute ago, I looked at the cases you noted that you found in the last 24 hours, and they were all just middle-class people minding their own business in their own home, but somebody thought they had something.

In one case, a 74-year-old woman, they took some valuables from inside the home and then took her vehicle and they were later caught in the vehicle, but they held a knife to her, threatened to kill her for what small amount of cash that a 74-year woman would typically have at home and a few knick-knacks out of the house and her vehicle. That is not a drug stash or a money stash. That’s just a typical citizen sitting in their house. That is extremely common nowadays, much more than people realize. Let’s define some terms first that are mistaken a lot of times. A typical layman comes home and finds the garage door open, his kid’s bicycles, his lawnmower’s gone. What’s the first words out of his mouth?

Shawn Vincent:

“I’ve been robbed.”

Tom Givens:

Robbed. That has absolutely nothing to do with robbery. Robbery’s taking something away from him in person through force and violence or the threat of force and violence. A burglary is someone forcibly breaking into a building with the intent to commit a felony therein. Now, we always assume it’s a theft. We always assume motivation is theft, but that’s not necessarily the case. And it doesn’t matter from a legal standpoint, it’s breaking into a building with the intent to commit a felony therein. That felony may be theft or it may be rape, it may be some kind of felonious assault, but it’s some kind of felony crime, they’re breaking into in order to accomplish that. So that’s what a burglary is.

According to the FBI, there are about 3 million of those a year in the US. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, it’s about 3.7 million. Doesn’t matter which number you pick, either way, it works out to over 8,000 a day. And 8,000 a day is enough to be concerned about. That’s not a rare occurrence, that’s not some esoteric threat that somebody faces every now and then, that’s 8,000 a day, every damn day. It’s a very hard crime to solve. In 2014, the arrest figures for burglary was 13.6% of the offense resulted in an arrest. It’s extremely difficult to prosecute, especially the profit type burglary where the homeowner’s not at home. There’s little for cops to go on.

The problem is about 28% of burglaries are burglaries of occupied dwellings. In other words, you’re home when the burglary occurs. That’s about a third, and that’s a big deal. And according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, part of the Justice Department, in 40% of those cases, the offender’s armed. So this is where the danger comes in. You got a very high volume of burglaries of occupied homes by armed intruders. That’s a recipe for real disaster. You get in between them and their exit, that’s a bad thing. If what they came in for was not your money, but it was for you or your kids or your spouse, that’s a bad thing. So that’s enough of those that you got to be concerned about that. That’s roughly a million a year of burglaries of occupied homes, and then 40% of those by armed people. So that’s a big deal.

About 260,000 last year, I checked, resulted in serious injury to the homeowner, which was defined as rape, murder, or aggravated assault. So over a quarter million of those a year. So that’s a lot, that’s enough to make me really concerned. There are two kinds of burglars. There’s what a psychologist would call instrumental burglary, which I just call a profit-motivated burglar, that’s the guy who’s there to steal your stuff. And then there’s the expressive burglar, which is what Steve was leading to. He is not there to take your stuff. If he takes your stuff, it’s typically a secondary thing. Quite often, just trophies, if you will.

Shawn Vincent:

A souvenir.

Tom Givens:

Yeah. They’re there for you. They’re not there for your stuff, they’re there for you. So they operate completely differently. The profit-motivated burglar is very limited to the daytime, almost exclusively. In fact, the vast majority of the profit-motivated burglaries occur between 10:00 AM and 3:00 PM. Now, the reason’s obvious. What is it?

Shawn Vincent:

Nobody’s home. They’re at work, hopefully.

Tom Givens:

And in modern American culture, both part partners in a couple work, kids are at school. In many blocks, there’s nobody at home in the entire block in that 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM timeframe. So you can kick doors, you can haul TVs out the front door. You can have local alarms ringing. Nobody cares because nobody’s home to report it or even look into it. So that’s the vast majority of those. Most of your expressive burglaries are going to occur at night. And as I said, they’re not there for your stuff. They’re there for you. They may take some stuff when they’re done with you, but they’ll be dealing with you first. And so that’s the ones I’m really concerned about. The profit-motivated burglar, we can make it inconvenient enough for him that he’ll go somewhere else because he’s looking for an easy mark. He’s looking to make a quick buck. With the expressive burglar, we’re going to have to not only take some precautions to try to keep him out, but have a plan to deal with him if he gets in. And that’s a completely different ballgame.

Shawn Vincent:

We talk about the difference between home invasions and burglaries. Tom, do you put these expressive burglars in the category of home invasions?

Tom Givens:

Yes. The problem is there’s not a separate category. In the FBI’s Crime Reporting System, there’s not a separate category for home invasion. The home invasion is a type of burglary, so it’s a subset of burglary. So all you get is the total burglary numbers. There’s not a place in the Uniform Crime Report for “home invasion,” it’s simply a burglary. So we have to go through other research, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, primarily, trying to figure out how many of those are actually home invasions rather than just simply a profit-motivated burglary. That’s where we get the number of about a million of these years from the BJS. So it’s hard to nail it down because in most jurisdictions, there’s no difference in the reporting between a burglar that comes in at two in the afternoon, steals your TV, and one that comes at 2:00 AM and rapes you. They’re both burglaries.

Shawn Vincent:

Interesting. Don, the term “expressive burglar” is new to me, had you encountered that before?

Don West:

No, I haven’t, actually. That’s also a new term to me. I know from my work in the criminal justice system and having lots of conversations with police officers along the way, that what Tom is saying really resonates … that from law enforcement’s perspective, there’s the guys that want to get away with it. They just want to get in, get your stuff, and be gone. They may have a drug problem and they’re looking to score some money or find your drugs or whatever it is and get away. And often, those folks will ring the doorbell to try to be sure you aren’t home. They have no intention of confronting somebody. And then there’s that entirely other group of people that thrive on the confrontation, they may seek it out. They may have more than one agenda, but they don’t shy away from the physical confrontation and the violence that accompanies it.

In fact, they, in some ways, look for it, whether it’s a carjacking or a face-to-face robbery, or as we’re talking here today, more of a home invasion type robbery. Two distinct, it seems to me from what I’ve learned, two distinct mindsets of the criminal.

Tom Givens:

The problem with the profit-motivated burglar, typically, is when they’re surprised. They knock on the door and nobody answers. They knock again, nobody answers. They go around back, kick in the back door, come in the house, and there’s a homeowner. That is a common recipe for violence. But that wasn’t planned on their part, it wasn’t what they were there for. The other guys are breaking in with the actual intent. You’ll find these guys with rape kits, they got zip ties or duct tape or rope, weapons, ski masks, whatnot, in a bag in the back of their car. It’s actually a professional kit that they use in these home invasions. So two completely different motivations, as you said.

Shawn Vincent:

Now that we have a perspective on the threat that home intruders, armed burglars can pose to our families, now we’re going to talk about some simple common sense security strategies before we turn to our firearm that can delay a burglar’s entry into our home, give us as armed defenders time to assess the threat, come up with our self-defense plan and put it into motion. Here’s more of our conversation with Tom.

Shawn Vincent:

We covered a case, the Melinda Herman case, if you guys remember that. And this was a woman who was home with her twin children, grade school kids, in the middle of the day in a suburb of Atlanta. Someone came pounding on the door, Don, to see if anyone was home. She ignored them, but kind of looked out the window and saw this guy go back to his van and then come marching up the yard with a crowbar. So she ran upstairs with the kids, grabbed the revolver her husband had just the week before taught her how to use, and the guy splinters the door with the crowbar, comes in. And it is funny, Don, I remember that even when they caught him and in court, they really had a hard time determining what his motives were, because it seemed at first that he was there, didn’t think anyone was home, and was a profit-motivated burglar.

But for some reason, once he got the impression that there was someone home, probably a woman, he became this expressive burglar and actually tracked her down through three internally locked doors before she shot him four times in the face and neck, and he ran off and bled bad enough to crash his van into a tree and was captured. But that kind of explains, one can turn into another, even.

Tom Givens:

Tragically, he survived.

Shawn Vincent:

One thing I’m curious is, as a homeowner, discerning between the two. And I know Melinda saw, having someone mysterious or suspicious looking pounding on your door is one thing. You don’t know necessarily their intent yet. Seeing somebody in a van marching towards your house with a crowbar, that tells you something different. So as a homeowner, an armed defender, I imagine there’s some vigilance that we need to have if this is something we’re concerned about. And there’s a difference between somebody that you’re suspicious of who’s outside your house, somebody who’s forcibly entered your house, and I think there’s probably different ways of assessing the situation and approaching it.

Tom Givens:

Nowadays, with the prevalence of Ring cameras and doorbell cameras and whatnot, it’s really hard to justify not having some way of seeing who’s outside your home without opening a door. That can be as simple as an inset doorway so that you got a window that allows you to see behind people at the door down to something as simple as a peephole or viewport in the door. But one should never open the door to unknown people. Once you’ve done that, they’re in the house. A typical homeowner’s not going to stop the bum rush by two or three bad guys. Once you open that door, you essentially just let them take over. So you need to be able to see who’s outside before you open the door.

And now, I don’t go buy anything anywhere. I buy everything online. So the UPS guy, the FedEx guy, all sorts of delivery people are at my door all the time, so you can’t go nuts every time somebody comes to your door unexpectedly. That happens all day in modern society. But if you have some way to evaluate who that person is, that would be helpful. There’s a lot of difference between the UPS guy coming up the walkway with a box in his hand and some thug coming up walking with a crowbar in his hand, or somebody marching in the door with a rifle in his hand. It’d be nice to be able to see those things before you actually have a door open into your residence.

Shawn Vincent:

So tell us more about what you taught the folks at Tac-Con.

Tom Givens:

All right, let’s look at some of the background. First off, this just baffles me, but 40% of home burglaries involve somebody walking in through an unlocked door, four out of 10, two out of five. That baffles me, you wouldn’t think in the 21st century, you’d have to tell anybody to lock their doors, but that’s extremely common. About 10% come in through an unlocked window. So when you put those two together, half of the entries are made through an unlocked door or window. That’s goofy, lock your damn door. How hard is that? Window screens were removed in about 10% of the cases. That’s not that many. And one of the things I’ve seen as far back as when I worked patrol was if you have double-paned windows, as long as they’re locked, nobody ever comes in through those. They’ll come in through, if you leave them unlocked, they simply slide it up and walk in. But if they’re locked, for some reason, they just don’t like double-paned windows at all. So that pretty much eliminates that entry point as long as you leave them locked.

About 34% of the time they break down the front door. That’s a little counterintuitive. You’d think you wouldn’t want an entry point that people driving back can see, but they don’t care. And again, as we said earlier, in most blocks, there’s nobody there to see it anyway, so they just don’t care. So about a third of the time, they just break down the front door.

Shawn Vincent:

And I got a question for you, and I think, Steve, you might know this. Do you have any numbers or stats or even auxiliary experience, and how long does it take to get through a locked door? Because I saw a YouTube video of a guy with a crowbar got through a front door that was locked in seconds, six seconds, seven seconds.

Steve Moses:

Well under a minute. Well under a minute.

Tom Givens:

Yeah, I’ve kicked doors in with one kick, it’s not-

Steve Moses:

Yeah. What they’ll do sometimes, Shawn, is they will actually use a screwdriver or something to that effect just so they can be a little bit more quiet. That’s what happened to me. The guy wedged a big flathead screwdriver in the door and it just gave it up real quick, offered no real resistance at all.

Shawn Vincent:

It’s interesting. And Tom, you talk about little things that make a difference. And we did the Kavanaugh case. This was a former prosecutor, if I’m not mistaken, and she was at home with her partner, and somebody came into the house, just walked in. They thought it was, they were mistaken about where they were, and they weren’t an actual burglar, but they didn’t even lock their front door. Someone was able to come in. We talked about the Charles Dorsey case where he had locked his door, and it was a drunk friend of a neighbor who had been pounding and thought he was at his neighbor’s house trying to get in. And he’d called the cops. And at one point he had unlocked the deadbolt expecting to greet police, but he never relocked it. And this guy came back and started really aggressively hammering it, and the latch failed. And arguably, if he had had his deadbolt in, it would’ve taken a lot more effort for a guy without any tools to bust his front door down. And Don, we talk about this all the time. If you’re going to make an investment in a firearm, a decent firearm, that’s a reasonable investment. There are things that cost way less money than a firearm that could decrease the chances that someone’s going to come into your house. And that could just be a good deadbolt, good locks on your front door, doubled-paned windows, or at least decent locks on your windows, right?

Don West:

Sure. Anything that serves as a deterrent, that slows them down, gives you an opportunity to better manage the time, better manage the distance. And as Tom said earlier, it’s pretty cheap stuff to get a doorbell or some sort of alarm system, good lighting, peepholes, stuff that’s going to be very, very effective. A lot of times it may not save you from the three guys that are hell-bent on coming through, but at the same time, it’s going to deter a lot of those opportunistic situations.

Tom Givens:

None of the things I’m about to recommend are going to keep people out, that’s not the intent. It’s to give you enough time to find an effective defense. If you’ve got three seconds, you’re not going to have a very effective defense. If you’re asleep at three in the morning, what do you think three seconds is going to do you? On the other hand, if you can delay them for a minute, what could you do? You wake up, get up, get your gear together, think about what to do, and you got a minute. A minute is a hell of a lot better than three seconds. And none of the things I’m about to talk about will keep out someone who’s determined to get in. That’s not the point, the point is to let you know you have a problem and to give you enough time to respond to that problem. If you wake up, you open your eyes and there’s a guy standing over your bed with a butcher knife in his hand, it’s a little late to get into that loop. And if they’re kicking at my door, which is a steel door and steel frames with a good deadbolt and making my alarm go off and making my dogs bark, then I’ve got time to get up, get a 12 gauge and go to the catwalk and say, “Okay, come on in.” It’s like a roach motel. All the tracks lead in, but none lead out.

Most residential architecture is designed to facilitate bad guys. A hollow core door, for instance, that keeps the children out of your bedroom at night. It does not keep anybody else out. It wasn’t designed for that. Any exterior doors need to be solid and not have these decorative panels in them. And ideally, you want a metal door and metal frame, A wooden door and a wooden frame is kind of kidding yourself. I’ve kicked those open with one swift kick of a boot more times than I could count. Even if you got a decent deadbolt, it just tears through the wood. It’s not that hard to get in.

Shawn Vincent:

I only assume, Tom, that was in the line of service. You just don’t go around busting open wooden doors.

Tom Givens:

I don’t. And so a deadbolt lock is important, but it has to go in the metal. You’re kidding yourself with it going into a wooden door frame. It’ll just tear right through it. One of the things that Steve saw in the presentation when we did it live was the photographs of doors, the bolt tore right through the wood, just a track right through the wood where the deadbolt tore through it. So it’s got to have metal to metal. If you don’t want to go to the expense of a metal door and a metal frame, at the very least, you want to get an oversized strike plate. That’s the metal on the frame of the door that the lock goes into. One eight inches to a foot long with multiple screw holes in it, and then put three-inch screws in every one of those openings into the doorframe itself. Then you’ve got a metal deadbolt going into a metal strike plate that’s secured with screws that go all the way through the two-by-fours around the frame of the door. And that gives you several kicks before it comes open rather than just one.

So again, we’re buying time. You’re buying the time to say, I have a problem. I need to respond to the problem. Here’s what I’m going to do about the problem. And if they have to kick on the door repeatedly because you’ve got it set up correctly like that, then that gives you that time.

Shawn Vincent:

So I’m guessing you don’t have a decorative stained glass window feature on your front door, Tom.

Tom Givens:

No, no, no. They’re solid. And as I said, they’re actually solid metal doors in metal frames. The first thing we did, when we moved into this house, and you can kick on my door all you want to. It makes a loud, reverberating noise, but that’s all it does. The next thing is there are various designs of door stops that you take out during the day so the door operates freely, but at night, slip them into place and they prevent the door from opening even if the lock is defeated. Various real simple designs, and we show some in the PowerPoint that Steve was talking about, but very simple designs.

Some of them … just a metal plate on the floor with a couple of slots you stick a metal piece into at night that blocks the door from opening. In the daytime, pick it up, move it out of the way. It’s a doorstop to keep the door open in the daytime if you wish, but it’s out of the way, but it’ll keep somebody from just kicking the door in. 

The next thing people need to do is be a little more careful about personal information security. About 15% of people post on the internet when they’re going on vacation and that sort of thing, which tells all the burglars, you’re not going to be home for the next week or two. Most residential burglars live within a two-mile radius of your home. And don’t think that they don’t know what goes on in the neighborhood. They know who’s around, who’s not. They’re out looking, this is what they do for a living. They’re out looking for this stuff constantly. 

So the other things you can do, for instance, don’t put your name on your mailbox because then they come to the door and ask for you by name. Oh, you must know us. Oh, no. Oh, you don’t put Ms or Miss or Mrs on your mailbox if you live alone as a female. Now you’ve just told all the thugs that there’s a single female here. That’s the last thing you want the thugs to think. People call you on the phone, start asking personal questions, don’t answer them. No reason to do that. Somebody calls, they ask for the man of the house. You’re a female that lives alone. Don’t say, “Oh, there’s not one.” The guy just put a big check mark by your name. Just say, “Oh, he’s tied up right now. What do you need?” So stop giving them the information they need to victimize you.

Next thing I would touch on is lighting. That’s a very misunderstood aspect of this. A lot of people put up floodlights to illuminate what they consider to be the danger zones around the house. And the problem with that is if it’s actually dark outside, when you turn on the spotlight, you can’t see anything beyond it. You’re creating a dead area behind the area that you’re illuminating. So somebody could be standing two feet beyond what your spotlight is shining down on, and you can’t see them on the other side of the light. It’s often called a curtain of light effect. They’re behind the curtain and you can’t see them. What you want on the exterior lights especially are floodlights, not spotlights. You want to light the entire yard up, not a specific spot within the yard and leave dead spots that you can’t see into otherwise. And I think motion detector lights that charge on solar panels are the way to go there because you don’t have to have an electrician to run wiring for them and that sort of thing. I’ve got those on the outside of my house on the perimeter fence and whatnot, and they sit and charge all day long in the daylight. And then anything that moves at night turns them on for a few minutes, and then they turn back off. Now, if it’s a windy night and they come off and on all night, who cares? I’m asleep. I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me.

Shawn Vincent:

Do you suspect those have a deterrent effect too, if you’re moving into a dark yard and all of a sudden it’s well illuminated?

Tom Givens:

Yeah, probably not, to be honest. The thugs know about them. It’s just nothing secret about this stuff. In my area, all the houses have ’em, and they know they’re own. Sensors, they know it’s not somebody turning the light on. I don’t think it’s a deterrent at all. I see video every day in my, say, a 10, 15-mile radius of my home. One of the big crime problems around here is people going through cars at night, two or three in the morning, and you see them out there, the light comes on and they don’t even look up. They just go right about opening the car and doing their thing. If anything, the light’s illuminating their work for them. The purpose of the light’s not to scare them off, it doesn’t do that. The purpose of the light is so you can see when you look at your Ring camera or you look out the window, you can see what’s out there. You can see, is the wind blowing my palm tree around? I’ve got a really fat possum that comes over my fence pretty much nightly, sets mine off. But it’d be nice to be able to look at and see: is that the fat possum? or is that some burglar?

That’s what the lighting’s for. Deterrent, no, you’re kidding yourself. A burglar alarm, not a deterrent at least. And if you’re going to have an alarm, it’s going to have to be a monitored alarm to do you good. A monitored alarm means when it goes off, it notifies somebody. It may be an alarm monitoring station. It may go directly to a police agency, depending on where you are. But if it’s just a local alarm, which means it just makes noise that you’re home, it’s completely useless because nobody’s home. Nobody hears it. Most of the police departments don’t even dispatch to local alarms anymore. If somebody does call them-

Shawn Vincent:

Is there an argument if it’s armed while you’re sleeping, that that gives you more time?

Tom Givens:

Sure. But that’s all it’s for. It’s not going to make anybody go away. It’s not going to keep anybody out. I’ve got alarm signs in my yard, but I have no illusion that somebody’s going to stop and read them, if they can. But you want the alarm for, as I said, if a monitored alarm, because when you’re not home, that’s the only way you’re going to get a response to it. And as you said, the alarm is primarily just a warning system that, hey, we’ve got a problem of some kind. Get up and check it out.

The next thing would be dogs. Dogs are not the deterrent people think they are, and it’s kind of a two-edged sword there. If you actually have a dog capable of hurting people, they’re going to hurt people. They invariably, like the UPS guy, the mailman, the kid selling Girl Scout cookies, the meter reader, all of which will get you sued. Aside from that point, we don’t want innocent people chewed up, and if they’re not capable of doing real violence to somebody, they’ll just come and stomp them. I’ve got four small show dogs that one stomp and they’re gone. One stomp a piece. Their job is not to fight intruders. Their job is to bark when somebody comes up the walkway and say, “Hey, Daddy, there’s something outside.” And then I go check on it, not the dog.

Shawn Vincent:

In fact, one of those articles I sent you, the invaders stole the two dogs that the guy had.

Tom Givens:

Right. Pretty common. So that doesn’t do much. Next thing will be cameras. Cameras do not deny entry. They do not deter bad guys. They do not make you safer. So people need to get some understanding of that. Cameras are everywhere now. They’re not a deterrent whatsoever to bad guys. They serve two functions for us. First, as I said before, if you’ve got external cameras, you can see what you have. Do I actually have a problem or do I not actually have a problem? Do I have a mailman? Do I have an intruder? Do I have a possum or a car prowler? The Ring camera can tell you those things without you having to go outside, which is critical. But the other thing I think that they can do, which is often overlooked, is they can document what happened. Don, If I had to shoot an intruder, would video of him kicking in my front door be useful in court later?

Don West:

Well, I think that it might be helpful, yes. I think it might.

Tom Givens:

Yeah. One of the illustrations I used for that in my PowerPoint, is the guy literally kicking a door out of the hinges. You see wood splinters just flying from the doorframe and the guy’s got a pistol in his hand. Now, if I showed that image to responding cops, that would save a whole lot of yacking about what went on.

Don West:

Well, one of the critical issues when you are defending your own home, of course, is whether it was a forced entry, a non-consensual entry, that sort of thing. And when you have any clear evidence that it was in fact forcible, non-consensual, then you trigger those presumptions that clearly favor the homeowner in any kind of home defense scenario, separate and apart from the standard self-defense standards, frankly.

Tom Givens:

So to me, that’s 99 and a half percent of the value of the camera. Right there is documentation. You show the guy prowling outside with a gun in his hands before he kicks your door down, that’s corroboration of your version of the events.

Shawn Vincent:

Sure. It shortens the police investigation, for sure.

Tom Givens:

Yeah. Yeah. I’m all for making things as easy for them as possible.

Shawn Vincent:

Don, you were going to-

Don West:

Oh, sure. Well, yeah. The knocking the door down is the extreme end of that, it may not be quite that violent, quite that physical, but when you can show evidence that someone is out there casing your place, making movements toward it, setting up, getting ready, and then if there is something at the door or at the window that might be sort of equivocal, when you’ve got this other corroborating evidence, it makes it clear what their intent was and makes your burden to the limited degree it is to show that it was a non-consensual entry, that this wasn’t somebody that had been invited over earlier.

Tom Givens:

We weren’t scuffling around and broke the door in rough horseplay, the guy kicked the door in with a pistol in his hand. That would be pretty useful.

Don West:

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Tom Givens:

So that’s the sort of things I’d like people to look at. As you said before, just buying a gun and thinking that takes care of it is rather shortsighted. Look at a realistic look at your doors. How easy would it be to breach them? Take some steps to fix that, even if it’s as simple as a bigger strike plate and longer screws, give you the time to get up and get moving. Have an alarm system and actually use it. I couldn’t tell you how many burglaries I’ve looked at where they got in alarm system, but it wasn’t on at the time. Just like having a carry permit and having a gun in the sock drawer when you’re at the Walmart. It’s not doing you any good. If you want a dog, make sure you get a dog that pays attention to what’s going on and barks if something is unusual, not a dog that bites people. The one that lets you know you’ve got a problem.

Shawn Vincent:

Sure. A dog is an early warning detection device, at best, when it comes to security.

Tom Givens:

Yeah. Mine are furry little burglar alarms. That’s all they are. They just.

Shawn Vincent:

Give you an extra few seconds. Yeah.

Tom Givens:

What you don’t want to do is wake up at three in the morning with somebody already in the house. That’s a much, much harder problem to deal with. There’s no reason to ever have to deal with that, none. You literally can’t get into my house in the amount of time it would take for me to get up and mount a defense. 

Shawn Vincent:

All right, friends, that’s the end of part one of our conversation with Tom Givens. Next time we’re going to have a conversation about how to deal with threats at your front door. We’re going to talk about adopting the right mindset to stay out of trouble, and then we’re going to talk about what to do if the intruder gets in despite all your best efforts. Until then, be smart, stay safe, take care.