Pulled my gun the other night
Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 4:30 pm
So I'm asleep in my bed Saturday night, and there's a knock on the door about 3 A.M. It's loud enough to wake me up, meaning the guy really wants in. I grabbed my trusty 9mm and headed for the door.
Living where I live, it's not a good idea to open the door after dark if you're not expecting anyone, and this was most certainly unexpected. I looked through the peephole and saw a big Hispanic post-teen, probably late college-age, whom I did not recognize doing the pounding. I told whoever-it-was through the door that "It's 3:00 in the morning, what do you want?", and the guy yells, in a drunken slur, "Elijah you (expletive deleted), you know who it is now open the door!" I'll let you guys in on a little secret; my name's not Elijah. Being only half-awake, I didn't have sufficient control of my verbal faculties to tell him he had the wrong door; instead what I said was "No, I don't know you, go away and leave me alone". This did not have the desired effect; the guy now starts kicking my door. Keep in mind, my 9mm has been in my hands since I got out of bed, and it is now pointing at the door, safety off, cocked. I neither announce that I am armed (I don't say anything else to him), but even though the door is sheathed in metal, I've had doubts about the strength of the door jamb.
Luckily I didn't get to find out the load limit of the deadbolt or burglar latch; he stopped kicking and started flat-hand pounding the door. While extremely annoying it's not going to bust my door down anytime soon if kicking didn't do it. So I'm confident at this point he doesn't have the will or ability to pound his way through a metal-plate door with deadbolt, security strikeplate and plate-steel burglar latch (hard to describe; it's a metal C shape that fits in a plate bolted to the door jamb and seems to be pretty effective), but I can only imagine the fit my apartment manager's going to throw when she sees the dents in my kickplate, and I do have to sleep, so I call 911 and report a drunk and disorderly. I'm properly awake now, and my sports watch with a stopwatch feature happens to be right next to the phone, so I grab it and start the timer. I figure it'll take 10 seconds for the dispatcher to relay the call and about 5 minutes for them to show.
Meanwhile the guy is now whimpering at Elijah or whoever he thinks is on the other side to open the door. I figure he can whimper all he likes until the police show, but now that I've called them I'm gonna look a bit like an idiot to the officers if I scare him off, but I'm not going to play mind games to keep him there until then. Eventually it penetrates his plastered cerebrum that he's probably got the wrong apartment, so he turns around and starts pounding on the opposite door. No response. Timid tapping. No response. So he turns and walks away into the apartment complex. A minute later (3 minutes since I phoned it in, pretty good response time considering), a Dallas PD unit shows up, knocks on my door, I see the uniforms and open it. Their first words were, in the style of many a Warner Brothers cartoon, "which way did he go?". I point them in the right direction, they walk around for about five minutes, don't see anybody, and leave.
Then, next morning, I dress for church a little more grumpily than usual, head out my door and the guy from last night is also coming out of the apartment above me. Apparently there was a pretty good to-do in the apartment above me that I WAS able to sleep through, and the guy had been called out to join the party, the only trouble being the guys in the apartment were too drunk to remember the unit number and the guy coming over was already too drunk to remember verbal instructions. He had no clue which other doors he knocked on, nor did he have any clue what would have been waiting for him had he actually managed to bust down the door, and I didn't tell him; I figured now that he's back in his right mind, telling him I had drawn on him through the door would have been counterproductive in almost every conceivable way.
Lessons learned:
1. My front door makes a far better wall against human intrusion than the Cowboys' O-line, and was far cheaper.
2. If the door's not in danger of collapsing, it's not serious and there's no need for the cops.
3. If the door is collapsing, the cops aren't going to get there in time anyway.
4. A gun at your bedside table is a nice thing to have.
Living where I live, it's not a good idea to open the door after dark if you're not expecting anyone, and this was most certainly unexpected. I looked through the peephole and saw a big Hispanic post-teen, probably late college-age, whom I did not recognize doing the pounding. I told whoever-it-was through the door that "It's 3:00 in the morning, what do you want?", and the guy yells, in a drunken slur, "Elijah you (expletive deleted), you know who it is now open the door!" I'll let you guys in on a little secret; my name's not Elijah. Being only half-awake, I didn't have sufficient control of my verbal faculties to tell him he had the wrong door; instead what I said was "No, I don't know you, go away and leave me alone". This did not have the desired effect; the guy now starts kicking my door. Keep in mind, my 9mm has been in my hands since I got out of bed, and it is now pointing at the door, safety off, cocked. I neither announce that I am armed (I don't say anything else to him), but even though the door is sheathed in metal, I've had doubts about the strength of the door jamb.
Luckily I didn't get to find out the load limit of the deadbolt or burglar latch; he stopped kicking and started flat-hand pounding the door. While extremely annoying it's not going to bust my door down anytime soon if kicking didn't do it. So I'm confident at this point he doesn't have the will or ability to pound his way through a metal-plate door with deadbolt, security strikeplate and plate-steel burglar latch (hard to describe; it's a metal C shape that fits in a plate bolted to the door jamb and seems to be pretty effective), but I can only imagine the fit my apartment manager's going to throw when she sees the dents in my kickplate, and I do have to sleep, so I call 911 and report a drunk and disorderly. I'm properly awake now, and my sports watch with a stopwatch feature happens to be right next to the phone, so I grab it and start the timer. I figure it'll take 10 seconds for the dispatcher to relay the call and about 5 minutes for them to show.
Meanwhile the guy is now whimpering at Elijah or whoever he thinks is on the other side to open the door. I figure he can whimper all he likes until the police show, but now that I've called them I'm gonna look a bit like an idiot to the officers if I scare him off, but I'm not going to play mind games to keep him there until then. Eventually it penetrates his plastered cerebrum that he's probably got the wrong apartment, so he turns around and starts pounding on the opposite door. No response. Timid tapping. No response. So he turns and walks away into the apartment complex. A minute later (3 minutes since I phoned it in, pretty good response time considering), a Dallas PD unit shows up, knocks on my door, I see the uniforms and open it. Their first words were, in the style of many a Warner Brothers cartoon, "which way did he go?". I point them in the right direction, they walk around for about five minutes, don't see anybody, and leave.
Then, next morning, I dress for church a little more grumpily than usual, head out my door and the guy from last night is also coming out of the apartment above me. Apparently there was a pretty good to-do in the apartment above me that I WAS able to sleep through, and the guy had been called out to join the party, the only trouble being the guys in the apartment were too drunk to remember the unit number and the guy coming over was already too drunk to remember verbal instructions. He had no clue which other doors he knocked on, nor did he have any clue what would have been waiting for him had he actually managed to bust down the door, and I didn't tell him; I figured now that he's back in his right mind, telling him I had drawn on him through the door would have been counterproductive in almost every conceivable way.
Lessons learned:
1. My front door makes a far better wall against human intrusion than the Cowboys' O-line, and was far cheaper.
2. If the door's not in danger of collapsing, it's not serious and there's no need for the cops.
3. If the door is collapsing, the cops aren't going to get there in time anyway.
4. A gun at your bedside table is a nice thing to have.