“Burgler, huh? You think its right to steal from me? Don’t you think you deserve to be punished, you worthless scum!?”
“Y-yes, Mistress Jodi…”
whip-snap “Yee-ouch!”
whip-snap “Yee-ouch!”
whip-snap “Yee-ouch!”
“And stop your sniveling; you’ll only get more…” 
-d&r-
Call 911, rouse husband, arm myself with the heavy, forged steel fireplace poker my husband made just in case they come into the bedroom. Female, married, no children. I wouldn’t be able to get downstairs and out of the house undetected. The bedroom has a deadbolted door though, so it would at least delay them getting in to me, and the room is oddly shaped with a niche I could be in, away from the door and any bullets coming through if the burglar is armed. Should the burglar come into the bedroom, he’d learn what pain was.
If you kill someone merely for threatening your property, I think you deserve to be convicted of murder. Your property rights are clearly inferior to his right to live.
If I heard a burglar in the house, and I had a gun, I would not go downstairs to meet him. I would call the police, ready my weapon, and wait. If he got near the stairs I’d yell “Stop! Who’s there?” If he entered the staircase I’d shoot him.
Every single person who acquires a firearm at some point considers this question. But its ubiquity has more to do with popular culture than an understanding of the actual risks.
First, to answer the OP’s question, in which there is a buglary at night while the family is present:
-get kid into master bedroom & barricade door with floor to knob bar.
-wife calls 911 & activate panic button on alarm
-.45 comes out.
-intruder is warned that we are armed and police are on their way.
-break out hearing protection for everyone. (gunshots are loud)
-let police clear the house.
-if intruder breaks down bedroom door, shoot him till he falls down / runs away / stops
Some points to consider: “clearing” a dwelling is incredibly dangerous, and double so alone. Even armed. By making the intruder come to you, you are in a much superior tactical position. Not to mention that you have prepared a much more solid legal foundation for your subsequent defense.
Now to reality. The vast majority of burglaries occur while the occupants are at home / school, during the day. Any halfway competent thief will ring the doorbell first to see if anyone’s at home, and be ready with a half-assed excuse if the door is answered. (I’m lost - where’s the bus stop etc.)
If you’re not home, there’s nothing you can do except trust you alarm system and/or your dog. If you are home, answer the door in an assertive manner in a way that the door cannot be forced open: use an intercom, talk through the door, or from a second floor window. Don’t rely on those little chains, storm screen doors, and especially don’t open the door.
If you see / hear an actual break-in while at home during the day, then things get a lot more complicated. Especially if there a kids at home too. At night, everyone is usually in a known location, bedrooms are close together, and usually far away from routes of ingress; doors can be locked and time bought to get organised and wait for the police. All that goes to pot during the day. Your kid(s) are in different rooms than you, you are far from them, far from your safe room, far from your gun, and you have way less time to react. It’s a real clusterfuck.
Because there is such a wide range of scenarios, it’s much harder to have a definite contingency plan. But here are a few of my guiding principles:
-dial 911 right away, but don’t stand there just talking to them. You have more important things to do. The operator may be able to piece some things together, but will in all likelyhood call out police, fire, EMS, the municiple bylaws officer, and the town dog-catcher, and the US cavalry if available.
-rescuing/saving kids comes before anything else, even you own personal safety, but how to do this is often unclear. If they are young and conveniently nearby, grab’em and run like hell for your saferoom or out of the house, whichever path is not blocked by an intruder. Grab whatever weapon of convenience you can get where you are at the time: kitchen knife, tools, sports equipment, bottle of chilipowder, etc.
-the nightmare scenario is the one where violent attacker(s) are between you and your small children. Here, personal beliefs, abilities, available weapons, etc vary so much, that I can’t even make suggestions, except to say that this is something to think about BEFORE this happens. Hopefully this never happens. Hopefully the intruders will just want stuff and not bother the kids. Hopefully they can be distracted (all my DVDs are over there - you can get $10 for everyone at the used book store) Hopefully the police get there in time. This can be a situation where you have to risk or lose your life to protect your kids. In my case, I think I would try to fight my way to my guns, then come back to get my kid. That’s because I know I’m not good at hand to hand, but I’m a pretty good shot at indoor distances. I know I can make a brain-stem shot (playing-card sized target) at 10 feet. If the bad guys chase me, so much the better, they’re not going after the kid.
What-if scenarios like this are useful tools, because they help us plan for situations in which there will be no time to think a lot. They help us think clearly about difficult situations with grave moral implications. But after we take them out and play with them, we have to remember to keep them in perspective. We can’t let the fear of the worst case scenario we dream up affect how we react to all situations:
-most likely, we will not be home if someone comes to rob our home.
-most home robbers, as illustrated by the anecdotes above, will take off like a scalded cat if they just see someone. They’re scared too.
-the stranger in your house may not be a robber with bad intentions: it could be one of your kid’s friends, someone in need of medical help, or a neighbor just too drunk to realize this isn’t their own house, or even a passer-by who saw your roof is on fire and is coming to save you.
trupa.
40, married, father of 1 trusquirt.
:smack: of course I meant at WORK / school. So I wrote the exact opposite, idiot that I am.
Unfortunately, this can be problematic.
In 2000 (in Minneapolis), I woke up to the rhythmic thump. Laid in bed for several minutes trying to figure out what it could be. When I got up and walked to the stairs, I discovered that it was someone trying to break through my back (steel core) door. Obviously if he had been working it for that long without progress, he was either really drunk or on drugs. I went downstairs to the kitchen and yelled out the window for him to fuck off. He stopped, looked at me and went right back to throwing his shoulder into the door.
I grabbed the nearby phone and a large butcher knife and called 911. While on the phone with the 911 operator, I yelled out that I was calling the cops. Again, he stopped and looked at me, saw me with the phone and the big knife…and went right back to bashing my door.
At that, I told the 911 operator that I needed to go get my gun. She tried to stop me and demanded that I stay on the phone. Nope. I hung up and went to find my pistol. Took me several minutes to find and load it, because I had recently cleaned everything and put it all away. The idiot kept bashing throughout this whole time.
Walked down to the window next to him and held up my .357 magnum with the 6" barrel. Said “I just want you to know what’s waiting for you if you manage to get through that door”. The guy took off like a rocket, not through the fence gate, but over the fence and down the alley.
FORTY FIVE MINUTES LATER, a single cop car drives down my alley.
And keeps right on going.
If that guy had gotten in and killed me, I would have been lying on the floor for days, with him and his crackhead friends looting my house and partying over my dead body, until eventually my family came to check on me.
That was my object lesson in defending myself without relying on the Police.
Make no mistake. The job of the police is NOT to protect you. It’s to deal with the aftermath of the crime. Don’t ever believe that you don’t have to act in self-defense and self-preservation because the police will be there to save you.
My loved ones and my sense of security at home are very valuable to me. Consequence of violation: stabbytime. I don’t have a gun (too expensive to get competent with one at this point), but any intruder not intimidated by two hundred pounds of snarling lard and fur* is going to get punctured.
*Yours truly. Will someday delegate this description and duty to a dog.
That sounds like a pretty good plan,I’m going to find out where I can get one of these kids for myself,thinking about it I could get two and keep them on the floor by my bedside.
I assume that you feed them up plus plenty of milk before bedtime so that the diapers are fully loaded in case you need to use them for real during the night.
Apart from that the U.K. way on discovering intruders in your home during the hours of darkness is to ring 999 and ask for the police.
The emergency operator then asks you your name,address and phone number several times in a leisurely manner to ensure that you are not a hoaxer and when satisfied that you’re not you are allowed to tell them that you are being burgled.
You then receive a lecture that the 999 number is for EMERGENCIES only and that you should have dialled the local area police enquiries number which you first have to look up in the book and then when you finally get an operator to answer it you have to tell them which station you want,which department and do you know the name of the person you wish to speak to?or the number of the extension.
If no one is actually being murdered you shouldn’t be tieing up
an important emergency line when people with SERIOUS problems will be prevented from getting through but as you’ve done it :just this once she’ll put your message through but dont make a habit of it,people are so irresponsible.
After this a constable will come around maybe the next day maybe the day after,several days after or sometimes they forget all together and you will be issued with a crime number,he will desultory take some details for forms sake ,commiserate with you…Yes its terrible,there seems to be no end to it the little Bastards .why doesn’t somebody DO something about it.(This is the copper speaking not the householder)
He then goes back to the station,files it and forgets all about it until somebody is actually caught in the act or grassed up and then he gets the prisoner to admit to every burgulary committed in the area for the last two hundred years in return for
the most lenient charges, bail and a light sentence.
This is useful for the annual statistics where the police proudly proclaim that the solving of crimes was up 2.3%
There is one major difference if when speaking to the operator you mention that you’ve been fighting with the intruders she will tell you that help is on its way.
In no time at all a squad car or two will scream up to your front door,the police burst in ask who the householder is handcuff him and drag him out the front door.
They will then ask the burgulars if they are all right,check them for injuries and take pics of them .
The police will then charge the householder with Grievous Bodily Harm,though regretfully it must be said “You really shouldn’t have taken the law into your own hands sir”
“But there were three of them,they attacked me and my wife was in the other room”
“Ah these lads are all show sir,if you’d left them alone they’d have run off after a few token blows but you antagonised them when you hit them back”
Because of your unwarranted aggression against the "They aren’t really bad lads ,they’ve just fell in with bad company"it will be politically non viable to charge them and if they haven’t actually been convicted for their previous offences they’ll get compensation for their bruising.
The householder meanwhile will receive a serious lecture in court on his irresponsibility ,get hammered for court costs and either get fined or a short prison sentence and for probably the first time in his life have a criminal record.
And more then a few of my mates are Coppers!
What about if you have a dog that would start barking and waking up the neighborhood before he even approached the house? Our dog is a major barker, really loud, basically acting as sort of a canine burglar alarm. He’d probably be afraid of being detected. (Seriously, that dog will bark at any of the tiniest noises.)
Other than that, stay upstairs and call the cops. I don’t have a gun, and really, most of our valuable stuff is upstairs. The only things that he would probably want would be the computer-and that needs an upgrade. Maybe the Tiffany-type lamp, and the Depression-ware glass?
My husband would call 911, grab his gun out of the lockbox, and yell down the hall (and into the phone) that the burglar should get out and any approach into the hall will be taken as an attack and responded to with shooting. Burglar can take anything he wants on the way, just stay away from the kids and the parents.
Once I have established that the person is not someone who belongs in the house, he takes two to the chest and one to the head.
Civilized or not, a man that invades the sanctity of my home and threatens the safety of me and my family had better hope that my aim is poor that night.
IMHO, any country that doesn’t allow a person to protect their home and family has done its citizens a terrible disservice…
What I did when it happened to me was stood there holding the phone, somehow managing to dial 911. When they saw me making the call, they ran out the door.
Well I’m sorry but I most vehemently disagree,speaking as someone from none gun owning Englandif I were you I’d give the little shit two in the chest to stop him and one in the groin to let him know what he’d done and then when I heard the Old Bill at the end of the street finish him with a head shot to stop any litigation from his lawyers.
Mind you in England if you waited until the Police were at the end of your street before you fired the final shot the burgular would have most likely have made a full recovery from the first three rounds and would desperately be needing a haircut.
Male, no kids.
I feel pretty burglar-proof, because I live in small second floor apartment with really sturdy doors - you’d need something more than lockpick or crowbar to open these - and I have habit of always locking doors whether inside or outside. But if somehow burglar got inside, my first, gut-reaction response would be to stalk stealthily behind him and conk him in the head with something heavy. If I had time to think, though (and realize how stupid it is) I would react depending on condition - where he is, how big he is, armed or no, alone etc. I currently have no gun in home, but even if I do, my apartment is too small for gun to give any advantage. On the other hand I have several practice swords as well as couple of working ones literally within reach and know how to use them. Most probably I would try to subdue burglar, just because I’m that kind of man that don’t like crimes go unpunished. If he attacked me, well, he started it…
A friend of mine has a pair of handcuffs (no not that sort of friend) and has told me his plan is to hold them at gunpoint and have them handcuff themselves to a utility pole outside his house, then he will call 911.
My personal plan is hold at Glock-point, call 911. I’m not letting the guy go so he can rob other people if I can help it.
You should certainly stay away from them if there’s any suspicion of a history of depression in either your family or your spouse’s family, too, especially if you have kids. That’s why I will never allow anyone to keep guns in my house. I’m glad that my parents didn’t have any guns when I was a teenager. I think if they had, there’s a decent chance I wouldn’t be here now.
There’s a difference between dealing with a real burglar as a homeowner, and playing Burglar and Homeowner. 
Not a good idea at all.
Handcuffs are very heavy. A desperate criminal who doesn’t want to go to jail could throw the cuffs at your face, take your gun and plug you with it.
How do you know that he will really cuff himself properly? While you inspect the job that he did, he will “break” free, smack you in the face with the cuffs, take your gun, and plug you with it.
What if he says no? Are you going to shoot him because he refused to cuff himself? Good luck explaining that one to the cops.
Well, I’d let the BIG dog bark his face off, then I’d throw the cat at the burglar. Yes, the cat. The dog may be intimidating, but the cat has “fear farts” that are noxious enough to take out a platoon.
Okay, real answer: I keep some sports equipment under my bed, so my baseball bat or hockey stick would be handy. Our bedroom has a door to the outside, so while the dog is flipping out, we’d evacuate and go to the neighbours, but I’d have the bat in my hands just in case the bad guys happen to flee in the same direction as us.
I trust that these days you’re more prudent about having it available quickly should the need arise.