Editorial

Home Invasion

David A. Lombardo

A few years ago I was speaking to a Tea Party group about home invasion. I explained the idea of using one's bedroom as a safe room. Part of that presentation includes cautioning against going "hunting" in your home, for both personal safety and for liability. After the presentation a young man came up to me and was very confrontational: "I would never hire you to train anyone," he said with agitation. He felt if someone breaks into your home, you should seek them out and shoot them, period. 

 Okay, I understand that very few things in life are as frightening as a home invasion or as likely to get a strong reaction. The media is full of violence, and when violence spills into your doorway, the result can be deadly one way or the other, but what are the odds? Well, not particularly good if you're a home owner. Statistics tell us one of every five homes will encounter a violent home intrusion or burglary, and the number is increasing. Not all states use the term "home invasion," so to put this in perspective, we'll use the more common term "burglary." A burglary occurs nearly every 15 seconds in the United States. 

 The press has a tendency to ignore home invasions that are thwarted by the use of a firearm; it doesn't fit the liberal media's agenda of banning guns. They do, however, have a real proclivity toward multi-day coverage when a home invasion ends with the home invader being shot. The twisted logic of that escapes me completely. Having said that, for the sake of this discussion, I'm going to put aside the issues of personal safety and liability that result from searching your house at two in the morning in response to the sound of someone downstairs. I have a larger fish to fry. 

 When teaching lethal force classes at SAFER USA, we'll occasionally get someone with the attitude, "I'm going to buy a gun, and if someone gives me any crap, I'm going to kill him!" We saw an example of that a year or so ago when a Minnesota home owner literally executed a teenage boy and girl who broke into his home. I mean that quite literally: they were both unarmed, and after he shot them and they fell to the ground, completely eliminating any perceived personal threat, he then shot them in the heads to finish them off. He even got a second gun to kill the girl when the first one jammed, and he proudly told that story to the media. 

In class I'll ask students what's the purpose of shooting someone that's threatening them, and the answer is almost always "to kill the person." Let me make something very clear, and we stress this repeatedly in our classes: the object is not to kill another human being. The object is to prevent the person from harming you. Once the threat has ended so too has your need for self-defense. Many will glibly point out that a dead intruder can't harm you, but that's not quite true. 

If you think pulling the trigger ends the problem, you're sadly mistaken. Shooting someone is the beginning of a problem, and whether it's right or wrong, urban-area juries commonly have the mindset that if you had a gun-even a legally-owned gun-you were probably doing something wrong to begin with. It doesn't do you any good to shoot an intruder then go to jail for doing it or be sued civilly and lose everything you own. 

Terminating an attack on you or your family is the goal of having a firearm for self-defense. You want to be able to say to a jury that you did what was necessary to stop the threat. 

Gallup Poll: Public supports guns in the home

For decades anti-gun groups have been trying to scare Americans into getting rid of their guns with the claim that you're more likely to have a problem if you have guns in your home than if you don't.  But whatever they've been doing all these years apparently hasn't been working.  Not only have Americans been acquiring guns at record levels, Gallup recently reported that 63 percent of Americans now believe that having guns at home makes them safer, nearly double the percentage reporting the same belief 14 years ago. Gallup's finding that personal safety is the top reason that Americans own guns today and its finding in 2008 that 73 percent of Americans believe the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms clearly show where the American people stand.  The news that most Americans believe that guns enhance their safety at home should cause anti-gun activists to re-think not only their strategy, but the point of their disarmament crusade. Furthermore, Gallup found, support for having guns at home is shared by majorities of men and women, white and other Americans, people in all major geographic regions of the country, and Republicans and Independents.  Only among Democrats does a majority still believe that having a gun at home makes them less safe.

UN cites Ferguson for doing away

with Second Amendment

In a December 1st article in the New American, Alex Newman reports that the United Nations is on another gun control rant using Ferguson, MO, as the excuse. Pointing to the killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson, along with subsequent unrest in Ferguson and policing issues, the United Nations just launched another brazen assault on America, U.S. sovereignty and the gun rights of Americans. UN boss Ban Ki-moon, the global body's "Human Rights Council" and even the UN "Committee against Torture" all took turns lambasting the United States as an alleged stronghold of systemic racism and police brutality. To fix the problems, the UN argued, Americans and their elected officials must submit to the demands of self-styled global "authorities" who want more unconstitutional gun control to further restrict access to firearms and implementation of UN rules for police. The most recent UN meddling in U.S. affairs began shortly after the grand jury's decision not to indict Officer Wilson for the death of Brown. According to Ban's spokesman, the UN boss also wanted to echo the appeal made by Michael Brown's parents to "turn this difficult time into 'positive change.'" Ban, whose own UN "peacekeeping" forces have been exposed for slaughtering and raping civilians systematically all across Africa and beyond, said his thoughts were "first and foremost" with Brown's family and with the "entire Ferguson community." The establishment press celebrated Ban's involvement.