Home Invasion Facts, Figures and Statistics
For sheer terror, there are few emergencies that will be closer to home and statistically more likely to occur for the average prepper than a home invasion.
Home invasions may not have the region-wasting punch of a major natural disaster or some other exotic event, but I can guarantee you they will be more than disastrous enough for you and your family. There’s precious little time to react during a home invasion situation and absolutely no room for error.
Successfully preparing for and defending against a home invasion involves a lot more than having a gun and a flashlight on the nightstand ready to investigate some bump in the night.
A comprehensive, holistic home invasion plan will wrap your home in layers of security like an onion: you want to dissuade, slow down and hopefully stop the bad guys from getting in in the first place.
If you can’t stop them at least funnel them into an area where you can engage them on your terms.
There’s a lot to learn about home invasions in order to craft a good plan. You’ll need to know about interior and exterior defensive strategies, criminal behavior and psychology, and know how to handle yourself in a fight.
And you need to do it all while your family is in the home with you. It won’t be easy, but today we are presenting you with a guide to arm you with the right stuff for surviving the terror and chaos of a home invasion.
A home invasion is one of those crimes that most people, whether they would admit it publicly or not, think will never happen in their neighborhood.
At least, people that don’t live in high-crime areas think it will never happen to them.
I hate to say it, but the chances are increasing all the time that they may be wrong. Possibly dead wrong.
A home invasion is defined as a criminal entry of a dwelling while the occupants and/or owners of the dwelling are present. This is different from a cat-burglary which occurs when the structure is unoccupied.
We are fortunate that overall crime and violence is going down, but regrettably home invasion is one category of crime that is becoming more popular over time. Some more facts about home invasions in America:
It cannot be overstated how shocking, how fast and how violent a home invasion is. You must be prepared.
And the first step in preparing for a home invasion is understanding the mindset, the tactics and the objective of the criminal scumbags who will be kicking in your front door.
The prospect of facing a home invasion strikes a nerve with many preppers and with good reason. The notion that you could be so brazenly attacked in your very own home by a posse of criminal scumbags is a bitter prospect.
And unlike most self-defense scenarios that people typically practice, there will be the added pressure to perform with an environment full of the people that are most precious to us.
If you are unfortunate enough to be one of those one million-plus homes that are invaded every year you or your loved ones will then have about a 25% chance of being violently assaulted by the criminals. Ponder that…
We are not going to let that happen to you, though. Unlike the naive, shiftless and cowed masses you are ready, willing and able to do something about.
Your first prerogative is to know when you are most vulnerable. Statistically, most home invasions will occur after sundown with the vast majority taking place between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m.
Compare and contrast that with your typical burglary. Most of those take place in broad daylight. Does that seem strange to you? It shouldn’t; the burglars are counting on the occupants to be gone when they break in, meaning at work, at school or elsewhere.
Home invaders are just the opposite; they are counting on the occupants to be home and they use maximum speed and violence to intercept and then corral them before they can mount an effective resistance or call for help.
That being said, you are never safe, not entirely, from a home invasion and they can and do occur and hours of broad daylight.
The next vital piece of the home invasion puzzle you’ll have to put together is understanding why your house was chosen among all the other houses on your street, in your neighborhood and in your town.
Most criminals do this stuff for a living; many of them are not stupid, and there is a reasoned calculus to their decision-making process.
Typical indicators that home invaders look for when choosing a target house are things like poor lighting, line of sight blocking obstructions between neighboring houses and the target house, signs of inactivity, easy routes of ingress and egress, and so on.
There is far more to the average home invader’s selection process than a simple checklist, however, it will definitely help you to understand how they make their decisions.
Once you start to get inside the criminals’ decision-making process, you can then reverse-engineer defenses and countermeasures for your house and property that will hopefully keep them from considering it at all.
Your typical criminal will plan and execute a home invasion or other crime in six steps, listed below.
Before they do anything, your average criminal looking to make a score has to take in some information that will direct them to where the loot, or the easy mark, is.
It could be something as innocuous as a social media post revealing that you will be home alone while the rest of the family is out of state at a competition.
It might be the conspicuous pile of valuable electronics boxes you set out for the trash pickup. It might just be a property configured just so that makes them feel really safe breaking in.
Criminals will usually gather intelligence on potential targets, read that as victims, until they have enough to choose from.
After sorting, sifting and comparing all of their gathered intel, our criminal element will compose a list of potential targets worth their time. Here there are many variables.
The skill, ambition, habits and preferences of the criminal are all factored into this decision-making process and they may filter and sort potential victims for days, months or even longer.
Some may choose a victim within seconds after minimal intelligence gathering. You could get sighted today and robbed tonight in some cases.
Believe it or not most criminals don’t blunder straight into a crime. They will surveil and closely watch the selected victim to gather even more information.
They will look for habits, vulnerabilities and size you up to try and determine if you will fight, run or just give up. Observation will likely continue right up until the point of the attack and all the way through the next phase, planning.
The planning phase may occur concurrently with the observation phase, and both could be concluded in as little as a few seconds.
No matter how much time or how little the criminal takes in the planning phase, they will begin to figure out the best way to get close to your house unobserved, make entry to the house and hopefully find you and overpower you so they can get to work extracting a toll from you and in either treasure or blood, or both.
Once the planning is wrapped up, the bad guys will move. It is on the approach to the target that the victim has the best possible chance to catalyze the attack, and either repel the attacker or get them to break off.
Defensive measures that will slow, halt or confuse the attacker work best while they’re in this phase. Anything that costs them time or injects uncertainty into their decision-making process increases the likelihood that they will break off.
It is now that the criminals actually break into your home, if they are not stopped. Keep in mind that the bad guy always gets to choose the duration of the attack unless you stop him!
If he has no incentive to halt his attack he will keep going until he has achieved his objective.
No matter if the criminals succeeded or not they will move to escape and do so, hopefully, without getting shot, shanked or beaten up.
Of special importance to your average criminal is the desire to escape without attracting any attention from potential witnesses or being pursued by police.
Here is a small homework assignment for you before we move on to the next section.
Glancing over the above steps in the criminal’s decision making process, at what point in that process do you think you would have the best chances to stop him from victimizing you and picking your house?
The answer is during the intelligence-gathering or victim selection phase. If there is ever a chance to avoid being victimized, to avoid a fight, you must take it.
No matter how good you are, no matter how skilled, no matter how heavily-armed there’s always a chance that the fight can go against you, and that may see you or your loved ones be grievously wounded or killed during a home invasion.
In the following sections we will move on to the practical elements of getting ready to defend against a home invasion, including making your home a hard target and preparing yourself to deal with the difficult task of repelling invaders.
Defending your home from a home invasion is a full-time gig, but luckily there are some techniques and procedures you can employ it will be on duty 24/7 without you lifting a finger once you have implemented them.
I’m specifically talking about hardening your home via some choice upgrades, careful landscape revisions and, potentially, the installation of some new vegetation.
You’re not going to have to build an 8-foot wall topped with broken glass bottles around your home to protect it. You won’t even necessarily have to put in a fence.
All you’re going to do is alter view landscape features, upgrade some door and window hardware there and before you know it criminals will take one short glance at your home before saying ‘nah’ and moving on to what is potentially on easier score.
If the criminals skip your house for someone else’s, that is a win right out of the gate.
There are four areas of consideration on your property that will need your attention:
Before you do anything, take the time to go outside and stand in front of your house. Now look at it, observe it as if you were the bad guy.
If you were the bad guy, where is the safest approach to get close to this house and hopefully get into it without being seen by the occupants or someone else? This is called a clue.
Now repeat this exercise from various angles, up and down the street and even potentially from your property line with your neighbors.
Carefully assess everything you can see. Look at all the windows, look at all the doors. Which one looks most likely to let you in easily? Are there any nearby tall trees they could be climbed to reach a second-story window?
Repeat this exercise from the backyard. Is a concealed approach to a big, juicy, easy-to-break sliding glass door available from the rear of the house?
If you are like most homeowners, no matter what kind of home you have and no matter where you live if you take this exercise seriously you will see plenty of ways to get inside the house.
That’s okay; we are going to take what you have gleaned from your observations and implement that into a troubleshooting plan to eliminate those shortcuts and “easy ins”.
Curtilage is just a fancy word for the grounds of your house that are part of your property. Your curtilage extends from the exterior of your house all the way to the sidewalk, the road or the property line depending on what borders your property on that side.
Consider the curtilage to be the sort of outer perimeter for your house.
Assess your curtilage by looking at the terrain features inside it. Look at the rocks, the shrubs, the trees. Look at any large decorative features like fountains, rock gardens and the like.
Do you have any large children’s playground equipment they could offer concealment for someone? How about a shed or outbuilding?
Of particular importance is your perimeter is fencing. People love privacy fencing because it makes for good neighbors, and good neighbors are nice but being safe from home invasion is better and fences make your home more likely to be targeted for home invasion.
Why? As soon as the criminals cross the line of your fencing on approach to your house they get more concealment on your property. If your neighbors can’t see what you are doing, they cannot see any scumbags sneaking up on the back door.
Also, don’t assume that a fence is a real deterrent to illegal trespass or entry on your property: the vast majority of privacy fences are way too short to be anything but a mild inconvenience.
Yes, you could crown the fence with barbed or razor wire and in a SHTF emergency to shore up the old home protection factor a little bit, but doing this in normal times is not going to make you any friends.
Dense, surrounding privacy hedges works similarly to fences but are practically even worse from a defensive standpoint. Hedges will block line of sight on your property, but are easily crossed compare defenses.
If you are fortunate, or unfortunate enough to have a wall around your property, you can take comfort knowing that they do afford you a little bit of ballistic protection from gunfire and may stop vehicles cold, but they have all the other vulnerabilities and shortcomings of fences and hedges.
Make it a point to trim back all plants and hedges that could afford bad guys a hiding place or a concealed approach to your house.
Make sure you do one more assessment of your curtilage at night. Assess the lighting.
Any predator wants to work in the dark if they have the choice, and that includes home invaders. Ideally, we went to deny them the use of the darkness by installing bright security lighting.
But you must be cautious: light that is placed or aimed carelessly can create even deeper, inky pools of shadow that can completely conceal someone.
A combination of bright spot and flood security lighting combined with softer wide-angle landscape lighting can keep your yard attractively lit, and also make it hell for home invaders to sneak through.
It is the rare homeowner who does not want some attractive plants to enhance the beauty and value of their property.
Many preppers will surely want the same thing, but preppers will also want their plants to serve double-duty as defensive countermeasures to a home invasion.
No matter where you live, no matter what the environment or the weather, there is some variety of plant that will grow there that will feature thorns, spines or some other ripping, snagging and tearing organic apparatus.
You can cultivate these plants beneath your windows, and potentially on either side of exterior doors leading into your home. This will certainly disincentivize home invaders from attempting to enter via the window, or lurking in ambush near a door.
Even if the spines themselves are not vicious enough to completely deter someone from moving over them, many of these plants will often raise enough racket to help give you a little bit of early warning if someone is trying to traverse them.
No matter which ones you choose, make sure they grow tall and wide enough they cannot be easily bypassed.
You have two choices when it comes to planting these prickly defensive plants: you can grow them from small, potted cultivars, or transplant mature plants. The latter is risky as it stresses the plants significantly, and might kill them.
The former is much easier, safer and less expensive, but you need to get a jump on that as soon as you can since plants take time to grow.
No matter which option you choose, give your defensive flora the care and feeding it deserves so it will stay healthy and keep on defending your castle for as long as they live.
Another option worth considering is the installation of security cameras on the outside of your house. The ability to remotely check the exterior of your home and additional parts of your property is surely handy and can increase your safety.
But this is a double-edged sword: the visible presence of security cameras may tip-off potential home Invaders that you are protecting something valuable inside.
The counter to this, of course, is to install cameras that have very little or no physical footprint. You should carefully consider the cost-benefit ratio of security cameras before committing to a system.
No matter how fastidiously you prep the grounds of your property in order to dissuade home invaders there is a chance your number will just come up. Maybe they have decided your house is worth the risk. Maybe there’s someone personally known to you that has a grudge.
Whatever the reason, the attackers have decided that they are coming on and are now going to attempt entry into your home.
The next phase of home fortification involves the entry portals into your home itself. I said portal in this case, not just doors, because we must consider every possible way into the home.
Windows, doors, exterior attic access, everything. Hardening these entryways will go a long way towards keeping the bad guys out or at least held at bay until you can mount an effective defense.
I mentioned it up above and I’m going to say it again here: roughly a third of home invasions begin with the invaders entering through an unlocked door or window!
Don’t be one of these poor, unfortunate homeowners! Keep all doors and windows closed and locked at all times.
If a window must be open for ventilation, make sure it can lock in the partially open position so it will at least slow someone down or force them to break it if they want to get in.
The most common way that home invaders will break in is simply kicking an exterior door right off its hinges or busting a sliding glass door or large bay window. We protect and fortify doors and windows in slightly different ways.
Let’s start with the physical makeup of the doors themselves. Absolutely every exterior door that could yield access into your home must be made from solid core hardwood or metal, no exceptions.
But the sturdiest door does no good if it is mounted with cheap, flimsy screws and other hardware. You might be surprised to know that it is the screw set itself, not the door proper, which absorbs most of the force when a door is rammed or kicked.
If you cannot afford to upgrade the doors themselves with thick, sturdy versions, at the very minimum you should upgrade all the hinges, all the locksets, and the screws themselves.
Adding additional hinges will increase the strength of the door as a system.
Just as important, actually more important, is upgrading screws to high-grade fasteners which go into the door frame at least 6 in. long and preferably more.
Stronger, longer screws likewise mean more strength is needed to breach the door, and will buy you time. If you are lucky, your home invaders may give up after a few failed kicks.
One of the best and lowest profile options for preventing a door Ram or kick is the cleverly named anti-kick device, typified and made famous by a company called Door Devil.
An anti-kick device is a low profile frame that will install between the edges of the door itself and the door jamb.
When activated, the metal framing of the anti-kick device transfers all of the shock and force into the structural frame of the door and surrounding wall, not the vulnerable screws or lockset.
They are very affordable and easily DIY installed on most doors. Definitely look into these for all exterior doors!
Now we move on to windows. Windows are somewhat harder to fortify compared to doors because of their vulnerable nature. They are made of glass, after all!
If you live in an older home with worn-out, drafty windows you should consider having them replaced with modern ones if at all possible.
This will obviously take time, and not an insignificant amount of money, but replacing windows is actually pretty simple and can be done yourself if you are reasonably handy. That can help keep costs down.
Window bars and security gates or shutters other good options, but almost always conspicuous in the way the security cameras are conspicuous. It might tip-off potential home invaders that your house is worth invading.
Also, bars and shutters that are not quick releasable are a major liability in case you need to evacuate the house rapidly through the window, say in case of fire.
A clever, low-profile option for fortifying a window is the application of a protective or ballistic-grade window film.
Mylar is one common application among several others, and is commonly encountered on homes near coastlines or in the Great Plains since they will make windows resistant or even partially invulnerable to airborne debris blown by powerful winds from hurricanes and tornadoes.
Thicker, stronger varieties of these window films can even afford you some protection against bullets, blunt impacts from tools and even cutting forces.
As with doors above, you must always, always keep windows locked and preferably shut.
The most obvious defensive upgrade for the interior of the home is an alarm system.
Do-it-yourself installed or traditional monitored systems can alert you when anyone busts a window or a door, and monitored systems can even summon help if you are too busy to get on the phone and call the cavalry yourself, say because you are repelling four masked bad guys with your trusty shotgun.
Alarm systems with a loud klaxon or siren also have a psychological effect on most criminals. Once the alarm starts howling, they know the clock is truly ticking and that reinforcements will likely be on their way.
No matter which alarm system you choose you must make sure every single door and window that could be a potential entry point into your house is rigged with a sensor that will activate the alarm whenever tampered with.
Ensure that your alarm system is more sensitive, not less, and not particularly forgiving of wrong key codes being entered.
You don’t want a 15 or 20 second warning countdown before the alarm actually goes off. Set that thing to 5 seconds, tops.
You also might consider an ancient primitive alarm system, or as most preppers know them, dogs!
You can get a big dog, or a small dog, it doesn’t really matter so long as the dog goes completely ballistic whenever it detects anything near or around the house.
The keen senses of canines far exceed the puny ones of humans, and so long as your dog is alert and sounding off when it detects something, you can be assured that your faithful pooch will hear the bad guys coming along before you do.
Larger dogs have additional advantages. Big dogs can deliver powerful bites, and many people are instinctively terrified of an aggressive dog.
Note that you must not delude yourself into thinking your faithful canine friend will go to attack mode just because he perceives someone in the home or threatening the family.
Yes, many dogs will but just as many will either do nothing except bark, or run away to save their own skins. If you are serious about using a dog in a truly defensive role, you will need to embark on protection training for you and the dog.
Oh, and one more thing about the alarm systems, if you choose to install one of the now popular over-the-counter wireless camera and alarm system combos you should keep in mind that the criminals of today are not the criminals of yesteryear.
They are increasingly technologically savvy and the installation of one of these systems means you’ll need to now become versed in and apply home network security procedures and other information system defenses to prevent your system from being breached remotely, turned against you or just disarmed.
Dealing with attackers inside your own home has a lot in common with dealing with them out in a public space, but also has some important differences. Let’s get into them.
First, the most obvious restriction: If you live at home with your family or just loved ones, in all probability simply trying to escape your own home and flee from home invaders will not be an option.
Chances are you will not be able to round up everybody inside and ensure they get out with you in time.
During a real home invasion, you must keep in mind that your attackers are trying to find you in your master bedroom, likely, as quickly as possible in order to overwhelm and subdue you.
They won’t be creeping around looking in the silverware drawer in your kitchen affording you the time to tiptoe across the hall, upstairs, back downstairs and then out.
This means you will have to make a stand and fight. If you are lucky, or just very good, you might be able to consolidate everybody in one room or one wing of the house, and then lock it down with lethal cover with no ensuing fight.
But the chances are good you will have to fight. That means you need to start training and learning how to fight now, and not making it up as you go along on that fateful day at 3 a.m. in the morning.
This is where you will have the principal advantage over the bad guys: They will only have one live trial run of going through your home on that day.
You have every day up until that day to prepare yourself and prepare your home for the fight ahead. Don’t squander it.
They have to get everything right and do it very quickly in order to win. If you can get into the fight quickly enough, stopping them, catalyzing the attack, you will very likely drive them off.
No matter how fit, furious and talented you are when it comes to hand-to-hand fighting, you don’t want to be bringing fists and feet to what is an all probability going to be a gun or knife fight.
You will want to obtain a weapon, preferably a gun, and learn how to use it. There has been an ocean of ink and countless bazillions of electrons spent on going over which gun is best for home-defense and under what circumstances.
I and other authors have done plenty of just that on this very site. I will go over briefly here a few factors to consider when choosing a home defense gun.
Since the turn of this millennium, rifles have become a surprisingly popular choice for home defense, dethroning shotguns in many areas.
The preponderance of over-the-counter legal short barreled rifles in the form of “large format pistols” has seen this type of firearm skyrocket as a self-defense choice.
Rifles afford a home defender immense stopping power, typically large magazine capacities and often excellent handling, but depending on the caliber one must be concerned about overpenetration.
Larger rifles and some carbines may also be difficult to maneuver in the cramped quarters of a home.
Handguns are in many ways the ideal home defense weapon since this is likely the weapon you are already the most comfortable and proficient with if you concealed carry on a regular basis.
Handguns have the advantage of being extremely easy to maneuver, are able to effectively be used with only one hand and are easy to protect from takeaway attempts, a legit concern if you should bump into a home invader at bad breath distance.
The disadvantages of handguns include limited effectiveness and being very difficult to shoot well, especially under stress.
For many preppers the shotgun remains the king absolute of home-defense weapons.
A classic and steadfast choice, typical defensive loads for shotguns have absolutely devastating effectiveness on human bodies, have the added bonus of being very easy to hit with if shot is employed and also allow you the flexibility of changing shell types for different circumstances or home living situations.
Some disadvantages include ferocious recoil, limited capacity and typically heavy weight.
You must consider a great many factors before choosing a home defense firearm. The layout of your home, location of bedrooms in the home, proximity of neighbors and other factors will all play a part alongside your own capability, proficiency and confidence with a given type of firearm.
Alternate lethal weapons include things like clubs or bladed weapons. You can use anything from a sturdy piece of lumber, a common hatchet or felling axe, a baseball bat or even a spear for home defense.
No matter what you choose, you need to practice with it if you want to be effective with it. Long handled weapons have the advantage of affording you some standoff distance from the attacker if they are armed with only a knife, but this will obviously do no good at all if they have a gun.
Shorter weapons like knives can certainly be lethal, but you must necessarily be within range of the attacker for you to bring your weapon to bear.
One often overlooked option for home-defense is pepper spray.
High quality, hot pepper spray is immensely effective when it comes time to take the fight out of someone and even if they choose to continue fighting it will seriously degrade both their vision and their breathing, giving you an advantage.
The obvious, major disadvantage of pepper spray is that cross-contamination is a thing; you may very well be affected by your own spray.
Additionally, pepper spray is obviously, purposefully not lethal, and if you don’t have a lethal force answer to a lethal threat against you, you might have a serious problem.
If you’re going to choose pepper spray for home defense make sure you get one of the extra large riot size cans that will yield advantages of more range, more solution going towards the target, and greater capacity for an extended defensive scenario.
If there is one scenario where a safe room would truly shine it would be a home invasion. A properly built and properly equipped safe room would be completely proof from even a team of bad guys trying to force their way in or shoot their way through.
Ideally, you and your family can hustle into the safe room, close and lock the door, and be all but assured that you’ll be safe as soon as the bad guys leave when the cops show up.
A properly equipped safe room will have redundant, independent communication systems to allow you to summon help no matter what has happened to the phone lines or the electricity. Keeping weapons, medical gear and other supplies inside is always a great idea.
One often overlooked element of safe room construction is the inclusion of a hidden and secured emergency exit that can allow you to bail out of your safe room and home in such a way that will evade notice and detection.
This may be the only thing that saves your life if someone decides to burn your house down around you while you are cowering in the safe room. Never leave yourself without a way out!
Safe room construction is an entirely separate topic, but suffice it to say it is often easiest to do while you are doing a major remodel or scratch build of a house.
If you aren’t, you can still install a safe room or convert an existing room into one, but this may involve extensive work and modification.
That being said, you should seriously consider a safe room for home invasion protection. Many preppers choose to make the master bedroom the safe room, since all they will have to do is gather the family members there and then close and lock the door.
For the truly serious preppers there are a few additional measures you can take to help minimize the chances that your house will be chosen for home invasion.
Some of these may seem fairly extreme, but they will contribute to your overall chances of living your life peacefully without having a team of scumbags kick in your door at zero dark thirty.
If you are not expecting company that is known to you, be that family or friends, don’t let them into your freaking home.
Traveling salesman, friend of a friend of a friend, “neighbor” that lives down the street, around the corner and across the glen, service and maintenance personnel, anybody and I mean freaking anybody.
Don’t let them into your home. You don’t know these people from Judas, and you don’t know their friends.
It is entirely possible that they may moonlight as a criminal scum bag, and are taking copious notes on their daily rounds…
You would be disgusted, astounded and horrified to learn how many home invasions that end with the death, dismemberment or maiming all the occupants begin with the attackers simply turning a knob and letting themselves in.
We are talking almost a full third of home invasions occur under exactly that scenario.
If you do nothing else but habitually, obsessively keep your doors and windows locked at all times, and you triple-check every single one of them before you go to bed at night, you will go a long way toward preventing a home invasion, or at least making it easy on your attackers.
PERSEC is a military acronym that is short for “personal security”.
Maintaining personal security means keeping personal details- things about your life, job, purchases, travel, habits, schedule, etc.- private and out of the ears, off the lips and off the airwaves of anyone who is not within your circle of trust.
Criminals constantly troll open sources of intelligence, read that as social media, to build their list of potential targets.
Aside from keeping the entirety of your life except your love of dank memes off of social media, stop blabbing to people you barely know about the comings and goings of your life.
The stereotypical idea of defending against a home invasion is often thought to be bolting awake, jumping out of bed in your jammies and grabbing your favorite flavor of gun before racing off to confront the bad guys.
Doing the job well involves an awful lot more than that, including defensive adaptation of your property and your house, careful planning of your defensive strategy and honing your skills for the fight ahead.
Use the information in this guide to get yourself pointed in the right direction and start preparing now. Pray that day never comes, but if it does, you’ll be ready.
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Excellent article, lots of good ideas.
It is refreshing to see an author not take a stance on suggesting the best type of home defense weapon. As a former police officer, I cannot stand reading articles where people are literally arguing over the best type of home defense weapon. From my training, I am equally skilled with a pistol, Long rifle, such as an AR-15, or shotgun. If I were to be the unfortunate victim of a home invasion, I would feel comfortable grabbing any three of those weapons which I own. For the average gun owner, whatever that means, though, the best home defense weapon is the one you feel most comfortable using should this type of incident occur. It is based on familiarity, training, and even body type. I don’t want anyone telling my petite wife that a 12 gauge shotgun loaded with buck shot is the best weapon for her when I know it will rip her shoulder off; conversely, her compact .357 is what she handles with ease. Again, the best home defense weapon is the one in which you feel most comfortable using.
VERY GOOD article BUT you had NOTHING for defense of a APARTMENT in a home invasion please do a article for the invasion of a apartment
If you live in an apartment, you generally cannot make any significant changes to the doors, windows or landscaping. Still, the first step of evaluating access to your apartment from the outside is still a good idea. Although you can’t make permanent changes, there are temporary changes you can make such a plants in pots. Wireless cameras are available.
Perhaps you can get your landlord to allow you to harden the door(s). Even if not, you could probably replace the small crap screws holding the hinges and strike plate with “real” screws and nobody would ever know. And there are wireless alarm systems which are attached with tape, so that is an option for apartments as well.
As for how you behave in an apartment prior to and during an invasion, it pretty much is exactly the same as a house.
Pepper spray is a HORRIBLE choice for defense in a home invasion. Once you spray it in a confined area like your house, you will contaminate yourself and everyone else in the house. Not only that but it is very difficult to decontaminate your house and your belongings. If you really want to use pepper spray, get the gel or foam kind. They won’t aerosolize in the house like the normal sprays. Also am curious on where you got your stats, because there aren’t one million home invasions a year. You might want to check your definition of a Home Invasion because I don’t think you understand what they are. Home Invasions are targeted, usually after a particular item. They aren’t random.
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