U.S.A. -(AmmoLand.com)- We start with a news report from Fox8 WVUE, and additional reports from ABC WGNO, both in New Orleans, Louisiana.
You are at home on a Tuesday morning. You’re taking care of your four-year-old daughter when you hear shouts. Four armed men rush into your house. They threaten you and hit you in the head with their guns. You are armed. You shoot all four of your attackers.
Now you scoop up your daughter and call 911. Your daughter is injured. EMTs take her to the hospital for treatment of a bullet wound. Police find two of your attackers dead at the scene. Two more of your attackers ran from the house and are found wounded in the front yard. EMTs take these attackers to the hospital.
Later news reports say your daughter is expected to fully recover from her injuries.
Comments-
No one wakes up on a Tuesday morning and thinks they will be in an overwhelming fight to defend their life and the life of their child. Some of us prepare for the unexpected anyway. We go armed. We took instruction and we trained. Some mornings, that training pays off.
Our defender recognized an attack. He continued to fight even though he was injured. He used a firearm to defend himself and his family. He put effective shots on his attackers. Our defender stopped shooting when the attackers were no longer an immediate threat. He stayed at the scene rather than chasing the fleeing criminals. He checked to see if his family was hurt. Our defender made a call to 911 to get help, and he made a brief statement to the police.
Bad things happen, and they could happen to us. There are over a million home invasion robberies a year. That averages to about one robbery with the occupants present in the home for every hundred homes. The good news is that most of those home invasions don’t involve four armed attackers. The bad news is that most robberies involve more than one attacker. Criminals don’t fight fair.. and neither should we.
The news report leaves us with a lot of questions. It doesn’t say how the defender stopped four armed men without getting shot. We can also speculate about why the attackers chose this home. I wonder if the dad had medical training and supplies to save his daughter’s life.
No one wants to make themselves a target. Was a relative or an ex-roommate involved with drugs? Addicts talk to other addicts and they will steal from anyone. This is the holiday season, and we don’t want to leave a large cardboard box on the curb that says “Rob me first!’ Sometimes we can find out why we were targeted, but most times we will never know the reason. Bad things happen to good people. The news articles don’t mention a forced entry, so perhaps the only reason this dad was attacked was that his front door was unlocked. One lesson is to lock our doors. That simple step protects our family.
Our defending dad was in deep trouble by the time he recognized his need for armed defense. We assume the defender had his gun on his body since he was able to defend himself. He didn’t have time to go back to his bedroom, load his gun, and get back to the fight. Few of us would leave our family defenseless so we could run away and get our gun. The good news is that we have tens of millions of new gun owners this year. The bad news is that they are still learning about holsters and how to carry their defensive tools.
We know the odds are against us if we are out in the open and have to draw our gun while attackers have their guns pointed at us. Fortunately, good tactics help us overcome a numerical disadvantage. We want to move so the attackers get in each other’s way. We want to move so the attackers can not shoot us without first shooting their accomplice. Maybe the good guy ran down a hallway and the bad guys followed him. That effectively stacked the attackers one behind the other. That means our defender could defend himself from one attacker at a time.
Angles matter. Perhaps our defender was in another room and was shooting at the bad guys from behind a corner. The attackers were in the open and our defender could see all of them. The attackers saw only an ear and a gun barrel if they saw anything at all.
We can also exploit the dimension of time as we defend ourselves. It is harder to shoot someone after you’ve been shot. Action happens faster than reaction. Perhaps our defender shot the bad guys before they understood that he was armed.
Most of us would step in front of a bullet to save our child. Part of our defensive tools are a family safety plan and first aid. Emergencies happen, and the response is different. We want our children to do different things in case of fire, an intruder, or a tornado. Talk to your children about where to go, and walk through the drill with them. It takes practice to hide under the bed and leave your favorite toy behind.
We are more likely to use our medical kit than our gun. Get some first aid/trauma training. The local “stop the bleed” class usually takes an hour and is often free of charge. The Red Cross also offers trauma training.
Rob Morse highlights the latest self-defense and other shootings of the week. See what went wrong, what went right, and what we can learn from real-life self-defense with a gun. Even the most justified self-defense shooting can go wrong, especially after the shot. Get the education, the training, and the liability coverage you and your family deserve, join USCCA.
About Rob Morse
Rob writes about gun rights at Ammoland, at Clash Daily, and on his SlowFacts blog. He hosts the Self Defense Gun Stories Podcast and co-hosts the Polite Society Podcast. Rob was an NRA pistol instructor and combat handgun competitor.
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