I live in a nice little beach community nothing much happens here, people walk their dogs on the beach, stroll around at night etc…etc… Last night we were watching American Idol -you can see the time I started a post in the cafe about Melinda Doolittle - the incident happened right after that. I heard one of the singers end and Randy start his commentary when POP, POP, POP, POP. Literally not 100 yards from my home, close enough that I told my wife to get down. We went into the bedroom and I did the only natural thing NO ONE ever wants to do in anger or fear. I grabbed my shotgun in the closet and loaded it. At this point my wife began to get scared, she phoned 911 - where she was told other people were phoning in the same thing. She was fearful that I loaded the gun, she doesn’t like guns and this was the closest we had ever been to loading a weapon out of fear or anger.
I’d imagined the scenerio in my mind many times, …what would I do if I ever needed a gun in my own home?..Anyway, the police came and spoke with our neighbors, they didn’t see anything, but they heard the shots…
In your opinion what would you have done? I guess I feel ok about loading my shotgun, but I wonder what I would have actually done if someone busted my door down in reality. I’m not an aggressive man, but last night with the irrationality of a situation become quite real, I found myself thinking about what I would have actually done. To protect my wife, I would have shot. Plain and simple.
This realization in itself makes me a bit queezy writing this. I never want to point a weapon at another person in anger or fear. That’s when people get killed. There is a part of me that wants to know what happened, and another part of me that would choose to forget. I konw there are a group of teenagers in a house next door, they are sort of rambunctious, and the cops said they had been there before. I really wonder what happened.
Wouldn’t have loaded my shotgun because I don’t have one. I imagine I would have called the cops, maybe told everyone to get down on the ground, away from windows, and maybe into the basement. Maybe would have checked to see if the doors were all locked if I could do so without evposing myself to the windows too much.
Just wondering - you sure they were shots? Not fireworks, caps, car backfires, etc.? IMO it would kinda stink if a non-threat caused you to have a loaded gun in your house.
I’ve been around guns long enough in my lifetime, to know what a pistol sounds like…and the quick succession, it was shots for sure. Many other people heard it as well. We were not alone.
…but it sounds like you leave a shotgun unlocked in your closet, and (from how it read) the shells seemingly nearby? I know there is a tension between “I need quick access to a gun for home defense, and it does me no good if I have to get a key from a kitchen drawer to unlock the gun’s trigger lock in my bedroom, then load the shells that i keep tucked in the back of a shelf in the laundry room” and “I want to be safe about gun ownership, so I lock up and spread out the necessary components to use said gun.” I’m sure you’re safer than the OP makes you sound. What are your safety precautions?
To the question in the OP:
I don’t have any guns in the house, and don’t imagine I’d want to. But, if I did, I’d probably do much the same thing as you. Panic can make people do irrational things, but for some people, it can just as well make them far more responsible. I’m reminded of this past weekend, when we went to an all-day Irish rock festival, with beer flowing all day and the final band being Flogging Molly, shitkicking punk. We tried to stay outside the crowd of idiots that would try moshing and crowd surfing, since they are dangerous and stupid activities, but as drunken morons are wont to do, the crowd still ended up coming to us a little bit. El Perro Fumando is a small woman, and doesn’t do too well in tight crowds. So when people were starting to push and crowd around, and she didn’t look too comfortable about it, a friend and I went into bouncer mode. I’m a very forgiving, docile person, but suddenly I was the cops in the middle of a concert crowd, trying to keep control, make sure people were having fun, but doing so safely and sanely. I was a human wall. I really did surprise myself that I would go into such a defensive, authoritative mode, which is really against my normal nature, but that’s what the situation demanded. It sounds like you felt the same response. You heard gunshots right outside, and you went defensive. It came to nothing, but a little caution is definitely not a bad thing.
I have been in the exact same situation; heard shots outside the house at night. My wife was curious as to what the noise was, and tried to look out the window. I pushed her away from the window, and warned her it was not a safe thing to do, and went and loaded my shotgun as well. Mine was locked up with the ammo seperately, and it did not take much time to get things locked and loaded at all. And to answer your question, yes. I was fully prepared to take whatever action was required should someone have tried to enter our apartment.
For the record: the shot gun itself is not locked up, the shells however are in a locked drawer. A quick flip of the key (from my key chain) and the drawer was unlocked the Winchester 12 gauge loaded.
Back when I was 20ish, I was living in a bad neighborhood with 2 of my best friends. We were drunk, playing PS2, and waiting for our pizza to be delivered. We heard some shots fired outside. We were drunk, feeling brave, hungry and maybe a little concerned it was our pizza guy that was getting shot. We did the only reasonable thing. Ran outside as quick as we could to see if we could see the action.
Doesn’t sound like shots were fired at the house, just near the house. This is at a beach? Four shots rapid succession? Damn kids screwing around.
I wouldn’t have taken the time to load a shotgun anyway (there are very few things as dangerous our useless as an unloaded weapon) just grab something that’s already loaded, but making sure the doors are locked would be much higher on my list. Someone is drunk or panicked, and either way they might show up at the front door.
Yes we live on a beach. I agree about a useless unloaded weapon. My wife on the other hand does not agree - thus it remains unloaded. Our doors are always locked.
If I heard shots, I don’t think my first reaction would be that they’re coming for me. When I was 20ish, living in a bad neighborhood like wasson, someone came by and fired shots into the apartment below me. It was about 1 am and I was reading in bed, right next to the window, right above where the shots were fired. I went into the kitchen (an interior room), got down on the floor and called 911. At no time did I ever consider that they’d try to come to my apartment. In your case, was probably either an accident, a domestic, or someone taking care of some sort of personal business. In my case, the guy below me had his car packed by 7 am the next morning and was outta there…never saw him again.
Sorry, wasn’t exactly aimed at you (aimed! get it? That’s a joke son)
I dunno, I don’t get too freaked out by random gunfire. Yeah, I’ll report it and keep an eye out, but usually it’s over pretty quick so there’s no point in getting too worked up.
And yes, this attitude is from living in Denver. Gunshots in Arvada are rare and get a “hmmm” rather than just turning the TV up
Nothing, since I live in a semi-rural area and we hear firearms during hunting season all the time. I’d rather not wake up to a shotgun blast first thing in the morning, but it’s a part of where I live and comes with the territory.
I think I’d only be nervous about hearing shots nearby if I knew of something bad that had already happened in the area.
I have been pissed off, on the other hand, when I hear shotguns after dark because I know that means someone’s hunting illegally and I’ve been this >==< close a couple times to calling the sheriff about that.
If it’s close, I get nervous and tell the kids to get down. It’s only been that close twice, and they weren’t home one of those times.
But shots fired in my neighborhood are nothing strange. I don’t even call them in anymore, unless it’s clearly a drive-by. And they’d be gone before I could shoot back, if that was my choice of action. Shots fired right in my yard, now, that’d be call for getting out the pistol or the shotgun, and the phone.
But on holidays? Yeah, there’s all sorts of shooting going on around here. Morons. Do they not know that what goes up, also comes down?
Wow, judging by what others have said, I may have freaked out a bit. But in my neck of the woods, this will be talked about for some time to come. It just doesn’t happen much around here. At all really. We hear hunters in the fall, but that is during the day and they are hunters. 4 pops in quick succession, no it’s not a hunter. It’s someone firing out of fear or anger or whatever was on their mind.
We were playing World of Warcraft on New Year’s Eve around midnight (we’re wild and crazy hedonists, doncha know?) when we heard what we thought were six shots in quick succession. They weren’t close enough for us to be certain, and we’d never heard gunfire around here in the previous six years, so we thought it might’ve been fireworks and didn’t do anything. When I realized it was midnight, we decided it probably was gunfire, and some idiot was firing his revolver into the air. We still didn’t call the police, though, because the sound really was so muffled we couldn’t have given them any idea where it might have come from.
With all due respect, Phlosphr, there are many sounds that sound just like gunfire under the right conditions. There are times when that sound cannot be distinguished from other sounds.
I’m not saying it wasn’t gunfire. I’m just curious as to why, if your doors are locked all the time, you would feel so threatened by an unidentified sound (outside your home and early in the evening) that you would load a gun. I realize you want to protect your family, but to me this seems like a potentially dangerous response to something we all hear every day. What were the chances that this guy was going to come through your door, guns a’blazing? Wouldn’t the more prudent response be to stay away from windows and call the cops (like Mrs. P did)?
Around here, it could be someone dispatching a deer that’s been hit by a car, too, and didn’t die on impact. We get more deer hit by cars here in a month than I bet the hunters get all season.