Take another hit off the crack pipe and change the channel.
Bomp!
Bomp!
Bomp!
Bomp!
Cue CHIPS theme
Roller Disco, anyone? 
I hear all you brave guys sayin you’ll take this nut job on, but shootin somebody isn’t as easy as you might think. Odds are very, very good you’re going to miss. Even if you go to the range on a regular basis, combat shooting is entirely different than shooting under casual conditions. I’m not ashamed to tell ya my first firefight made me piss my pants and I didn’t even realize it at the time. Thankfully this situation is not very likely to happen to you so your best bet might just be to lock the doors, put the wife and kids in the most protected place in the house and pretend no one’s home and that he goes away or the cops get there. If he gets in and you’re not armed it’s your fault not having the good sense to realize the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Phu Cat
10 minutes–that’s just about enough time to shave my chest, paint a big bullseye over my heart, and knock down a couple tequilas. I’ll be kickin’ it in a lawn chair in front of the house when he pulls up.
As others have be now indicated, the situation above would assume in most jurisdictions that you are in the house, and even if not looking him in the eye, not aiming your laser sight slightly left to center of his back.
An armed intruder comes into my house at night in the dark. I hear him in the house, make my way to my handgun, search for the intruder, get the drop on him and shoot him in the back. Murder?
I don’t do gotcha threads. If the thread is about anything in addition to the most explicit thing mentioned in the OP, it is how much posters trust the competence and intentions of their local police.
ETA:
… and how confident posters are in their ability to protect themselves/
I’ll venture a guess they don’t intend to spend much time listening to a story about somebody you pissed off ten years ago, and rather quickly begin scanning the premises for evidence of aforementioned crack pipes and such.
Change my view about what? About what I’d do if I had a very different home in a very different locale?
Nope, it wouldn’t change my view on that, because you can’t change something you don’t have in the first place.
I’ve got one question for the ‘wait at home and ambush the nutjob’ contingent. In a thread a few years back, persons who are familiar with guns were saying, essentially, forget about using a car as a shield if someone’s shooting at you; the bullets will just go right through. (I assume the engine block would be an exception to this rule, but I doubt that’s germane here.)
Wouldn’t the same thing be true of the stuff most houses are made of? I assume that the effect of drywall and most types of siding on the path and velocity of a bullet wouldn’t be all that great. I guess a 2x4 has a bit of stopping power; I’ll let you guys tell me. But whether or not it does, ISTM that the nutjob can shoot a bunch of bullets through the house before he even tries to enter it, which might or might not hit you or your loved ones, based on random chance, before you ever get the chance to ambush him. And most bullets will miss the 2x4s anyway.
And OK, suppose you’re in the basement. He shoots out the living-room window, jumps in, and starts shooting through the ceiling, floor, and walls of the living room. At this point, your chances of shooting him are much better than his chances of shooting you, since you probably know where he is, while the reverse isn’t immediately true. But it’s a crapshoot, isn’t it? Also, the more loved ones you have with you, the better the odds that he’ll kill one of you before you kill him.
There’s only one way out of my neighborhood by car, and that fact was behind the questions I was asking Skald about whether the nutjob knows my wife, and how well. If he’s never met her, and is unlikely to have any idea who she is as she drives out of the neighborhood at 30 mph and passes him as he’s driving in at the same speed, then I’m getting her (and the Firebug, if he’s at home) into the car, while I go into the woods. Presumably if the nutjob wasn’t going to recognize your wife as she drove by, you’d want to do the same before lying in wait for him.
(There may only be one way out of my neighborhood by car, but as I noted earlier, there are ways out to a lot of different places through the woods - which have a number of places where it’s easy to get turned around in if you don’t know them so well. (Plus he won’t know at first that I’m not in the house.) This is obviously not a resource everyone has available to them, but I do, and I’m glad of it.)
Since you’ve brought up the issue of likelihood, ISTM that that’s at the core of why I’m not going to be a good guy with a gun. On the one hand, I live in a low-crime area, the likelihood that anyone’s ever going to try to come after me specifically is infinitesimal, and there has been not a single situation I’ve encountered in 61 years that would have been improved by my having a gun on my person or otherwise quickly available.
On the other side of the equation is the more realistic (IMHO) possibility that if I had a gun in the house, my extremely scatterbrained 8 year old son would have managed to find the gun despite my best efforts, and probably drop it while swinging it around. By simply not having a gun, I’ve protected myself against what I perceive as the more realistic risk.
Not all houses are as flimsy as typical American timberframe construction. My house is solid baked brick, double wythe Flemish bond. Handgun bullets aren’t getting through that.
Well, yeah. But you’re in a house that was constructed in anticipation of a potential race war. I’m thinking more of muh fellow Americans.
What is the area, in square millimeters, of the ceiling, walls, and floor?
What is the area of a person’s body seen from above?
And what is the area covered by a circle 9 millimeters in diameter?
It’s not impossible that a random shot from him would hit someone before I shot him. But it’s extraordinarily unlikely. Much more unlikely than any normal table bet in a game of craps.
The alternative involves me in a car, leaving my subdivision via one of two possible exit routes, and the odds of his seeing and shooting one of us are much better. Still not great for him, I grant you, but considerably better than blindly shooting into walls, ceiling, and floors.
Both Bricker family cars have license plates that someone who knows my name would have no problem connecting instantly to me. If I could count on borrowing a neighbor’s car, then that might work. With either one of my cars, the risk is too high that the would-be killer would recognize them in passing.
Solid brick windows and interior walls too?
Since I can’t outrun bullets, I’d hope for a clean head shot.
I really don’t think the Victorian colonials in Cape Town had race war in mind when housing their railways employees. They just built them like they did back home in Britain.
Barred windows, brick interiors (one brick thick, I think that’d do). Of course, to get up to the windows in the first place, the guy would have to get through the steel fencing with spikes on top.