Unless they're luckily down the street they're going to take far longer to show up and handle it than you would yourself with a firearm. Case in point: Friend of the family and his wife were the victims of a home invasion by a crazy person recently. Through a cinderblock through the back door window and came in with a hammer. Beat the **** out of the man's wife and himself before he shot the ****er 4 times. Took about 15 seconds all told.
Does that imply that you think an AR is the best home defense weapon, except you want the police to carry yours and bring it to you when you need it?
If I can find them for sale to the general public, the latest Winchester Ranger T series. They reliably expand to an inch in diameter according to the tests on the Lucky Gunner website.
Yes it is. You are free to call it as you want but some states will arrest you if you have that in your possession.
i know, i was just being cheeky. i used to have a brass knuckle that was legal sitting on a desk as a 'paper weight' but illegal to carry around in public.
I live in rural also. It's for that reason that I make sure my home defense is complete. It's not always humans you need to worry about. They say 1 in 3 people is crazy. If the crazies aren't around you, then perhaps you need to look closer to home..
But as for the OP (and glad to see this thread has been going strong for so long), I'd personally say a well-trained dog. As for firearms, probably a 20 gauge pump. Cheap, easy to use, easy to aim, not a lot of over-penetration, easier on the recoil than a 12 gauge (so that even more gun-shy people in the household can use it). Load it with buck shot and you are essentially sending a few .45 rounds their way, and I don't hear many people complaining about the .45 for self defense. But the best answer is probably: whatever you've practiced with and feel comfortable using. Hell, I'd rather run downstairs with a .22 plinker that I've used for years than a .45 that I've barely touched.
Back around 10 years ago in Detroit we had the latest in black, liberal police chiefs. The average response time for a uniformed officer to get to a call in Detroit was 23 minutes. We got lucky and they hired a conservative black chief, who you will be hearing a lot more about in the coming months, when asked about the best way for citizens of the city of Detroit to protect themselves his response was that all citizens who could legally purchase and carry a firearm should do so. He said then that until he gets his department straighten out that all citizens, law abiding, should have a gun. I’m gonna take a stab and say that Chicago’s south and west sides, St. Louis, Baltimore, Miami, Memphis, LA And a few others are like Detroit was 10 years ago. Get a 9mm or .38 pistol or better yet a 12 ga. Pump shotty and stay safe.
I like a shotgun for home defense, I have shot them enough that if needed I can shoot from the hip and still get a good score on the target. What I have done recently though was to sell off my Mossberg 500 Persuader and replaced it with a Savage-Stevens 20 gauge, it like the AR has a full stock with a pistol grip and like the Mossberg it's a bottom feeder so if needed it can be strong hand held and remain pointed in the direction of the target while the weak hand con be shoving more rounds into the mag. While the 20 Ga is a lighter round with it is still delivering around an ounce of lead downrange and unlike a rifle round and some pistol rounds, if I partially miss the effect of what continues down range will be reduced by drywall or a double pane laminated glass hurricane window and a block wall will totally stop it. As such it is a very safe round to use in a situation in a home, where ranges are short and downrange friendlies may be present. It also compared to a 12 has much lower recoil, once i convinced my wife to try it she quickly got over the fear of firing a shotgun, she fired the Mossberg a long time back and that was it for her, the 12 had way too much recoil for her to tolerate, it also helps when it comes to ammo, 20 seems to be easier to find versus 12. I had 65 box's X 5 of 00 buck and 20 box's X 5 of slugs for the 12, I bought it quite awhile back, I put it up on Gunbroker for what I paid for it plus shipping and the next morning I received a e-mail from Gunbroker indicating I had sold it all of it overnight, my pricing was a bit lower that what 12 was going for at the time, but I still made money selling it. I'm sure i could of raised the price higher, much higher but I'm not into gouging, I can live just making a fair profit. All 3 buyers wanted to pay by PayPal, I explained that would raise the price by 3% and when paying refer the payment as merchandise, do not mention ammo as that will block the payment from being processed, no complaints received, they wanted their ammo. One buyer wanted me to ship USPS priority mail flat rate, he bought the majority of the ammo and he wanted quickly, but I cannot ship ammo USPS, I confirmed with UPS and offered to ship UPS Second Day and he agreed to pay for that mode of shipping, it was expensive compared to ground, but I always try to do as the buyer requests. I brought in enough money to get a nice stock of 20, the only hitch was trying to find lead shot, most of what is out there is steel for bird hunting, oddly enough I found what I was looking for back on Gunbroker and it was Winchester not some off brand from who knows where. Moral of the story, if anyone states stocking up on ammo is foolish or paranoid they fail to understand, it's like owning a precious metal, it's value remains stable while the dollar varies and when things get real weird, like nowadays it's value actually rises faster than the dollar is falling.
Yea right, the average time for a response to a 911 call in an urban area is 12 minutes, that's way too long when someone is busting their way into your residence and all you have to protect yourself is a cell phone. Or worse yet move out to where I live where it could take a deputy running Code 3 a half hour or more to get here, once dispatched.
Incorrect, burglars normally hit unoccupied dwellings, they do not want a confrontation, if they hit a occupied residence it is because they believe the occupants have something quite valuable such as cash or drugs. Because of that they will round up everyone in the home and convince someone to come up with what they are looking for, the problem begin when the homeowner doesn't have a lot of cash or any drugs then things get violent and ugly. I'll provide you with an example of what can happen. Awhile back in Hallandale Beach Florida in a rather well to do neighborhood, a couple of thugs broke into a occupied home, the previous occupant was a well known jeweler with a shop in Hollywood Florida, he did side work selling cocaine, he got nailed and took a multi-year vacation complements of the DEA. The new occupant was a businessman who didn't keep cash on hand and didn't deal in illegal drugs, the home invaders became agitated because of that and handcuffed his wife to a bed post, doused her with gasoline and threatened to set her on fire if her husband didn't turnover some cash and drugs, which he couldn't. Lucky for the husband the alarm system I installed in the home has silent panic buttons in a number of rooms and he had pressed a few of them, about 20 minutes after he pressed the first one the Hallandale Police showed up, as required they ran all of the tags of vehicles parked in the driveway, one came back as a stolen car from earlier in the day, that gave them probable cause to search the home and they called for more units. The home invaders being very outgunned wisely surrendered and the guys wife was transported to Memorial East to be treated for chemical burns. Bottom line is, if you cannot defend yourself, you and yours can be subject to a lot of pain or death while waiting for the police to show up. In the end I was hit with a multi-million dollar lawsuit because my Central Station (CS) took just over 7 minutes to get through to the counties Central Dispatch Center, that the Hallandale PD was dispatched out of, a couple of years earlier the county had consolidated most of the city's local dispatch centers into regional County Dispatch Centers (CDC), as part of that consolidation alarm dispatches could not be called into 911, those dispatches had to be called into a common non-emergency number, 765-4321, that number and you can try it out, quite often go's to a busy signal, or doesn't get answered at all, what we call Ring No Answer (RNA) for the log notes. What saved me was every call into or out of the CS was recorded and we proved the delay in dispatching the request for help was the counties fault, not mine. As such if you think calling a urban 911 center will result in the cavalry being dispatched, you are for a rude surprise, more so if you use a cellphone as many times the E911 switching system, Voice over IP Emergency Respond (VIPER) such as in Broward) will connect you to the wrong CDC, which requires the call taker to transfer you to the correct CDC, which often fails, requiring you to hang up and call 911 again.
Total baloney, many security systems can be compromised with very little effort, at very little cost. Here's an example of such a compromise, what the security guy has in his hand is a device that anyone can buy off E-Bay for about $50 , I have a few of them here on the farm for legit reasons.
Actually at the ranges found in most homes the pattern from a shotgun is quite tight, maybe a few inches across.
Thank you for doing that. Those numbers are skewed by the anti-gun organization that put them out, what they fail to mention is those numbers include criminals who are prohibited from possession guns and are many times victims of thug on thug violence. Another skewed number, by including suicides the anti-gunners more than double the number of firearm homicides, but what they also included was criminals killing each other. Take those 2 factors out and the actual deaths drop to a very smal number. And that is exactly what the anti-gunners want people to believe, which is why they skew the numbers and iie by omission.. 100% true, numbers like statistics can be shuffled around to suit the end result desired, what is important is to dig into where the numbers came from and what was included and what was excluded willfully.