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Rex B wrote:I seem to hear quite often that women take to 1911s.
I'll have to have my wife shoot mine more.

Be prepared to lose it if you do.

Then, of course, you'd have to buy another one.

Darn!

The Annoyed Man wrote:I imagine at some point that Excaliber, one of our resident security experts, will weigh in on this topic. But the essence of what he and others will tell you is this:

Stay in the house! Don't go outside. There are very sound tactical reasons for this.

Inside your home, you control the battle space, and you control the access to the battle space. You know the layout of the home, the bad guy doesn't. Imagine, you hear a noise in your back yard at night, so you grab a flashlight and a pistol, and you go out your back door to investigate:

1. You slice the pie in the yard and ascertain that it is empty. Must'a been a cat going over the fence. While your out there, the bad guy sneaks into your home behind your back through the door you left open. You not only have to now assault into your home (the opposite of what would have happened if you stayed inside), but your pregnant wife now gets to deal with a BG, while your outside.
2. You slice the pie in the yard, and low and behold, you corner the BG behind your shed. You order him to the ground and holler for your wife to call the PD. In the meantime, his accomplice, whom you did not see, sneaks up behind you and puts a round in the back of your head. Then both BGs go inside your home and attack your pregnant wife.
3. You slice the pie in the yard, find nothing, and go back inside. Your pregnant (and terrified wife) mistakes you for a BG in the dark and puts you down with two quick ones to the chest.

There are a lot of reasons to stay in the house, and no good reasons to go outside.

Thanks, TAM and Andy C, for getting out front on this one.

Please don't forget scenario 4 which could easily have happened in this case if the husband had been home at the time and followed the "I'll git my gun and check out that noise outside" procedure:

You attempt to slice the pie in your yard and an officer who was investigating another crime you had no knowledge of has followed suspects onto your property. (Pursuit of suspects doesn't allow for walking up to the front door, ringing the doorbell, and asking for permission to go into the backyard.)

The officer sees the silhouette of an armed individual moving toward him with a gun pointed in his direction. He determines that the crime he was investigating, the movement of known suspects onto this property, proximity, the muzzle direction of the gun, and lack of inadequate cover for himself present an immediate deadly threat situation and preclude either issuing a warning or using a flashlight. He fires his EOTECH red dot sight equipped AR15 3 times with deadly accuracy.

As the investigation unfolds and the full picture of what happened becomes clear, the officer feels really bad but is no billed by the grand jury because he made a reasonable judgment in a no win situation. You feel much worse. Your widow isn't doing really well either.

Almost this exact situation occurred here in North Texas recently, where a homeowner went outside to investigate sounds he believed to be gunshots with an air rifle in his hands. An officer, who was already on scene investigating those reports, encountered him in the dark and engaged him as a threat, with fatal results.

Armchair commando theory plays out really badly in the real world.

As TAM and Andy C have suggested, go with tactics that give you the greatest advantage and give up the least to an aggressor.

In the aftermath, I'll take some coulda' shoulda' woulda' talk from folks who don't understand incident dynamics any day over folks discussing my final tactical errors at my funeral.