I approach the topic of home security from the point of view that no one can do a better job than you of defending your own home from an attacker. This is especially true during a natural disaster or crisis situation when law enforcement officials will likely be too busy dealing with the aftermath of the event to respond to calls for help.
Even during the best of times, home safety is a major cause for concern. According to FBI statistics, in the United States alone more than 1.5 million homes are burglarized each year. That makes home invasions and burglaries two of the most likely crisis situations you’ll face, making it something you can’t afford not to prepare for.
Between criminals looking to enrich themselves by stealing your hard-earned valuables to people who have even more sinister motives behind their criminal undertakings, the need to protect your home has never been greater.
When it comes to natural disasters, or in the case of a prolonged economic crisis, the ability to protect yourself, your home, and your family from chaos is important. If you haven’t taken steps to secure your home and figured out how you will defend it from intruders, you’re doing yourself and your family a huge disservice and putting all your lives in danger.
One of your top concerns during any type of disaster is going to be the safety and security of your home and family. All your preparations and planning are going to be useless if some loser decides he’s going to kick in your door and take what you have. When disaster strikes, you are your family’s 911.
Even during the good times, when everything is relatively calm, most police officers will tell you there’s very little they can do to prevent a home invasion or burglary. During a crisis situation, when first responders will be taxed beyond their capabilities, counting on law enforcement to stop a bad guy is even more unrealistic and is not a legitimate plan for survival.
You need to be able to defend your home: that means having a firearm. I’ve seen some survival books suggest that guns have no place in disaster preparedness. In my opinion, the people who say that are either blinded by political ideology or have no clue about criminal behavior and what it takes to survive in the face of this type of danger.
You can choose to believe whatever you want when it comes to the politics of firearms. But when it comes to criminal behavior and protecting yourself from someone whose sole purpose is to do you harm, the real world starts to take over.
Criminals don’t care about gun laws; if they cared about the law, they wouldn’t be kicking in your front door to begin with. In most cases, there is no reasoning with someone who is willing to put his own life at risk by breaking into someone else’s home. The moment that person enters your home, all bets are off—including your political beliefs.
The simple fact is, when it comes to the safety of your family, their protection needs to be your number-one consideration and the driving motivation behind any good security plan. I can promise you that the criminal has considered his plan, his own safety, and his motivations well in advance of choosing your home. He is likely willing to do whatever it takes to win. Do you really want to gamble with your family’s safety by ignoring the cold hard facts of what it truly takes to be secure?
Firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens can save lives, and the numbers show it. Every year over two million law-abiding citizens draw their firearms in personal defense, saving a countless number of lives and serving as a serious deterrent to criminals. Often, the mere presence of a firearm is enough to stop a criminal dead in his tracks, without ever having to fire a shot.
How much ammo do you need? My school of thought is that you can never have enough ammunition. When it comes to defending yourself during a home invasion, I suggest thinking about it from the perspective of how much ammo you can carry in your firearm. That means buying a firearm that offers you the ability to hold as much ammunition as your local laws will allow.
Unfortunately, in some areas the amount of ammunition a gun’s magazine can hold is limited. So you will have to balance local laws with the safety of your family. But in general, the more ammunition your firearm holds, the more protection you afford yourself.
Even the best shooters in the world can miss during a stressful home invasion scenario, so don’t make the mistake of thinking that because you’re great at the range you only need a certain amount of ammunition to stop an intruder. I always fall on the side of being over-prepared, especially in the face of a dangerous home invasion.
What type of gun is best for home defense? This is incredibly difficult to answer. On one hand, stopping power is incredibly important; but in a home defense situation, you also need to consider what lies on the other side of those walls. Most homes are constructed of very thin walls that are not made to stop a bullet.
The moment you fire a gun inside your home, you risk hitting anything that lies on the other side of the wall. So while I fully agree that stopping power is an important factor when choosing a caliber, so is the safety of everyone in and around the house.
My best advice when choosing a gun for home defense is to weigh the options very carefully and spend time shooting with an instructor who is specifically trained in home defense situations. Your comfort, unique needs, and skill level are going to be far more important than the brand or caliber of the firearm.
Do you need a gun safe? While some experts say a gun safe makes it harder to retrieve your gun when you need it, if you have children, not having a gun safe is really not an option.
To give yourself quick access to your firearms during a home invasion, your gun safe should be located in an area where you can quickly access it. Also, for quick access I suggest looking into something with a Simplex locking mechanism. They are simple to use, fast and easy to access, and don’t require batteries or keys to operate.
Firing a gun inside a home during a defensive situation is not the same as firing a gun at the range. While range time is important and will help make you a more accurate shooter, you need to find a training facility that specializes in realistic defensive situations.
Which firearm accessories do I need? There are a million and one different add-ons and accessories for most firearms. When it comes to home defense, especially when faced with having to fight off an intruder in a nighttime situation, a good tactical flashlight and laser sight are two accessories that are well worth the money.
When starting to lay out a home security plan, your foundation should be built upon adding as many layers of deterrence and defense as you can.
The more obstacles an attacker has to go through, the more likely he is to move on to an easier home. Most criminals are looking for easy targets, so creating these extra layers of defense will at the very least give them a momentary pause, which can give you enough time to detect the threat and put your plans into place.
The first layer of defense starts outside your home, and it’s all about deterrence. If you can stop an attack before it ever happens, you immediately cut off any possibility of harm to yourself and your family. The idea here is to take away the criminal’s tactical advantage and to add highly visible security deterrents. External deterrents include:
Visible security measures. Fences, motion detecting lighting, security system signage, security company decals on your windows, and beware of dog signs, can all act as deterrents, giving most criminals enough reason to think twice when targeting your home.
Remove the criminal’s advantage. Criminals don’t like to operate in plain sight and will be looking for external features they can exploit—shrubs near windows that can conceal their attempt to enter, ladders sitting outside your home that can give them access to second-story windows, and things like trees that extend over roofs or toward second-story windows all need to be considered. Survey your property for these things and remove them immediately.
Add hedges or thorny bushes around the perimeter of your land. While bushes near a window can help conceal an intruder, hedges placed around the perimeter of your property can create a funnel that drives the attackers into one area. This can help give you a clear view of what’s coming and/or a clear line of fire in a defensive situation. To get even more bang out of your perimeter defense, consider planting thorny bushes that can be a huge psychological deterrent and help ensure the attackers have only one way in to your property.
Consider buying a guard dog. Unlike electronic security systems, which are vulnerable to power outages, a good guard dog is a natural-born security system. Not only can it alert you to potential intruders, but it can also create enough fear to make most potential intruders think twice about targeting your home. Guard dogs offer an extra layer of security and can be a powerful self-defense weapon should an intruder breach your security.
The second layer of defense involves fortifying your home. Your next line of defense will require you to think like a criminal, looking for points of entry and any weaknesses in your defenses.
Break into your own home. Putting yourself into the criminal’s mind can help you expose weaknesses that you may have overlooked while planning. Scope out your own home and see how many ways you can find to break in.
Strengthen all weak points. Reinforce windows, doorways, and all points of entry into your home. Outfit all doors with high-quality deadbolts and strike plates, and place wooden dowels or locking anchors inside your window tracks.
Secure your windows. Windows are one of the easiest points of entry into most homes. To better secure your home, make sure all your windows are fitted with double-paned laminated glass. As an added security measure, you can also apply specialty window films that will make your glass shatterproof.
The third layer of defense should come from your security systems. Whether it’s a professional monitoring system or something that just makes a lot of noise when your home has been breached, you need to install some sort of security monitoring system. Not only will the noise be enough to ward off most intruders, but it will give you the time you need to react before an intruder has the chance to get the drop on you.
Breakage alarms. Installing breakage alarms on all your glass windows and doors can stop an intruder in his tracks. These types of alarms detect small vibrations caused by an intruder who is trying to break your windows.
Battery-power alarms. Some intruders may cut power to your home in an attempt to evade security systems, so you need to think about having an alarm system that can run off a backup power system or 12-volt deep cycle battery.
Door-stop alarms. Battery-powered door-stop alarms are a good, inexpensive way to protect your home that will work even if the intruder cuts power to your home. They look like an ordinary door wedge but are designed to emit a high-volume alarm when an intruder attempts to gain access through a doorway. They are portable, which also makes them a great security device for those who stay in hotels while traveling.
The fourth layer involves controlling the intruder’s movement if he makes it inside the home. This can be done through the placement of furniture or by placing decoy valuables in an area that draws the intruder to it.
The main objective here is to create what’s known as a “kill zone,” where the intruder puts himself in a position where he’s vulnerable to attack. To do this successfully, carefully study the layout of your home, looking for an open area that you can funnel the attackers into, while at the same time finding an area in your home that conceals your body and gives you an open line of fire.
The final layer in your home defense is your safe room. Your safe room should be placed in an area where your family can immediately make their way to the room during an attack. The route to the room should be clear and help conceal family members as they run to the room. The route should be behind barriers that an attacker cannot shoot around. Even better would be a way to funnel the intruder into a vulnerable position while your family makes their getaway.
Safe rooms are your most important layer of defense, behind your gun! A safe room is a serious structure built within your home that is meant to protect your family from natural disasters, crisis situations, and most importantly home invasions.
While similar to a storm shelter, a safe room’s primary strength and purpose is protection from attacks inside the home. The room is meant to make it harder for home invaders to do you harm.
Building a safe room is not a security shortcut. A safe room is only as good as the plans you have put in place to deal with an attack. That means you need to have a plan in place and do routine drills in which every family member practices exactly what they would do during a home invasion or disaster. It also means stocking your room with adequate supplies and having a way to defend it should an intruder breach the room.
As I’ll discuss in chapter ninteteen, I’m not a huge fan of something called sheltering in place. In my opinion, when faced with a psychopath whose sole purpose is to do you harm, this strategy is flawed at best. Recent mass shootings have highlighted the need to be prepared to protect yourself in the face of a new threat—one where the perpetrator is bent on death and destruction.
While building a safe room may sound at odds with my advice on sheltering in place, I see safe rooms as giving you a tactical advantage. Taking refuge inside of a well-constructed safe room is far different from hiding inside of something like a closet, where the walls offer you little protection from incoming bullets.
A properly planned and constructed safe room will funnel an intruder directly into your line of fire and will be built in a way that makes it incredibly difficult to breach the room. A good safe room will allow you to respond to the threat under your own terms.
That being said, if the opportunity to get out of your home presents itself, it might be a much better option, provided you’re sure there’s nobody waiting right outside your home.
It needs to be built for defense. When you’re designing a safe room, defense needs to be one of the primary considerations during the building process. Your shelter needs to be set up in a way that creates a choke point that allows you to defend yourself from all incoming attacks. If your safe room ends up being a glorified hiding place, you have done little to actually protect yourself from a determined psychopath.
Construction materials need to stop an incoming attack. If you’re going to build a safe room, it needs to be done right; that means using high-quality, impact-resistant materials in the building process. Concrete-reinforced walls, steel doors, and reinforced ceilings are all things that need to be considered during the construction process. Your safe room should be able to protect you from not only extreme weather but incoming gunfire as well.
Keep surveillance in mind. Building a room without the ability to survey what’s going on outside the room is a huge mistake. Hidden cameras, peepholes, and listening devices are all things that can be added to the room, allowing you to track the movements of everyone inside the home. Just make sure that all electronic surveillance equipment can be powered from within the room in case of power outages or clever burglars who may cut incoming power lines.
Communication is key. A dedicated phone, cell phone charger, ham or CB radio, and an emergency radio should be stocked and ready to use inside the room. The moment you enter the safe room, someone should be trying to make contact with emergency responders.
Emergency supplies. While most home invasions aren’t going to last long enough to warrant using these supplies, your safe room should still be stocked with emergency food, water, and first aid supplies in case you need to use the room during a prolonged natural disaster or crisis situation.
Emergency escape route. In my opinion, every safe room needs to have an emergency escape route built into the room’s design. Unless you’re building a tomb, you need some way out of the room in case things go really bad.
As an added layer of security, the escape route should be built behind a wall or hardened structure within the safe room, giving you the ability to defend the room if the main door is breached. This will give everyone in your family time to make their way to safety while you hold off the attack.