If the intruder is that short, my dogs could handle them on their own.
Alternatively, you could always do what the Founding Fathers intended:
Eta:
Good show, lad! George Washington would be proud!
I’ve had lots of experience responding to calls from others. Burglars operate during the day when people are at work. They don’t expect to be confronted. They will usually run away when confronted. They know to hit the bedrooms, grab cash and jewelry and leave within a few minutes. If someone is breaking in at night that person is dangerous and expects someone to be home.
My wife and I live by ourselves in a very small town in central Oregon. Kids are grown and gone and I don’t know if they have keys to this house or not. Our phones spend the night on chargers in the living room because they make little beeps and boops at night despite our efforts to persuade them not to.
I would check that my wife was in bed with me (she often has insomnia) then I would grab my pistol out of my night stand and the flashlight, also on my night stand. I would step into the hallway to see if I could identify the source of the noise. Once I was absolutely sure is was an unwanted intruder I would give them a choice. Leave or die.
I’ve never had this happen to me, but a good friend was home with just her daughter and grandson a few years ago and had to dissuade an intruder with her husband’s 12 gauge pump gun.
Another good friend was murdered in his own kitchen, in front of his wife, by an intruder with a machete. And they lived in a very up-scale suburb of Portland.
Bad things happen. I don’t want me or mine to be a recipient.
If I heard someone in my house at night, my first thought would be that my son came home unexpectedly late. (He would never do this without letting me know, but there’s always a first time.) My next would be that it was a case of mistaken identity (i.e. someone trying to get into the wrong house). My next thought would be a petty criminal. In all cases, I would call 911 and barricade myself in my bedroom closet. There is essentially no serious crime in my area, and the town police are supported by the state police, who have a barracks less than 4 miles from my house. I’m fairly sure I would get a quick response. (And if I figured out it was my son, I would call the 911 dispatcher back and tell them, of course.)
I do have firearms, but they are all locked up and in a different room than the one I sleep in. I don’t feel like the area I live in is dangerous enough to justify keeping a firearm at close hand. There have never been any break-ins or anything like that.
If that were to ever change (such as a rash of break-ins or armed robberies in the area), I would reconsider. But even if I did have a firearm close at hand, my very last resort would be to confront a suspected intruder. In all cases, I would grab my firearm, call 911, and then loudly call out to the intruder that I had a gun and had already called the police. There is no circumstance that I would fire at an intruder unless they attacked me first. (Which is a policy I wish the police would take as well.) I don’t believe in shooting a person just because I felt threatened. I would retreat until I could no longer retreat, get in a defensive position, and wait for the police to arrive.
This happened to me once in my life.
Turns out, it WAS the police.
What happened was, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a man in our living room shouting, “This is [city] police!”
Apparently a neighbor had noticed that we had accidentally left the garage door open, and called the police to check on us.
First thing I’d do is surreptitiously check to see if it’s 1 intruder or more than just 1.
If just 1, maybe I can deal with him on-on-one.
Multiple intruders, better off just hide under a bed and call the cops.
Just put a +1 by that one for me. A firearm would be my very last line of defense.
They would come anyway, but they might be less inclined to shoot on sight when they arrived, i suppose.
I once knocked over my phone in the middle of the night while reaching for something else, and accidentally dialed 911 trying to grab it and keep it from hitting the ground. I didn’t realize I’d done that, and hung up. The police called back immediately. I told them what happened. They said, “okay, but we have to come by anyway.” So I got dressed to decency, and went downstairs. They arrived very soon, and left after i stuck my head out the door and confirmed it had been a mistake.
Reassuring, i guess. At the time i just wanted to go back to bed and it felt like a huge nuisance.
The only intruders we’ve had here where I live (1957-2024) were a neighbor’s dog (who pushed through a screen) and a semi-domesticated raccoon (who fell thru a screened skylight). Plus a few bats, birds, and bugs. The bats proved the biggest challenge but succumbed to my use of a lacrosse stick (an attackman’s stick, though a goalie stick would have worked better).
I do have the family small game rifle/shotgun locked up in the safe, but it’d take a while to retrieve it.
I don’t play golf, so no, I don’t need it.
- Close bedroom door
- Grab 12 gauge shotgun from closet, chamber a round (making the classic sound)
- Face closed door and wait, while Mrs. Cretin stands behind me, opens bedroom window and blows 100db whistle to the neighborhood, watching for police to arrive. Small town, cops would arrive within minutes.
- Hope like hell that the door doesn’t open.
When there’s a bloodthirsty marauder creeping down your hallway, you’ll wish to God you had a short iron.
We live in a apartment. If I woke up at night hearing someone in the apartment, my wife was accounted for and we had no overnight guests, my first guess would be that one of us had left the door to the house’s staircase open by mistake. I remember two occasions when I lived alone that I was woken by a neighbour hallooing at the door, because I had come home at night and crashed on my bed without towing the door shut.
If it turned out it was an intruder, I’d probably shout as loudly as possibly while leaving the bedroom door shut, which leaves the intruder an escape route. There are no dangerous weapons available in our bedroom unless you count my wife’s anger.
If this were Reddit, I would cross post this to r/oddlyspecific.
Given the above, and that the only other person who has keys to the house is my mother and father in law, I’d probably fort up since my bedroom is on the 2nd floor of the house. So quietly! wake the wife, have her lock the two doors leading out of the bedroom, and I’d open the biometric handgun safe. Once that was done, I’d use the whisper feature on alexa to call my FiL ( our phones charge downstairs) - if it’s not them, I would ask him to call the police.
Next I’d have Alexa turn on all the downstairs lights and announce loudly that the police are called, that we are armed, and that they should leave immediately.
Then wait for the person downstairs to leave in a panic, advise it was some neighbor and we’d left our front door open (or something equally silly but possible), or otherwise wait to resolve the situation.
Even with handguns and specifically chosen reduced penetration ammunition, directly threatening someone is only going to put myself, my home, and anyone nearby at additional risk, so that’s going to be a dead last resort if they’re trying to break into the bedroom.
Colorado Springs, CO if that matters.
The likelihood of an actual home invasion in my area is so remote as to be not considered.
However, I have a small flashlight within arms reach of my bed, and a 57 handgun with 20 rounds in it, on the shelf near.
If I actually found an intruder that I couldn’t recognise, in my house. I must declare to them that I am armed and they MUST leave. I must give them a way out, and LOUDLY recomend it. Several times.
If they fail to comply then I can shoot. But only after I have given them the ability to leave and several warnings. If they are being agressive toward me or my family, then I can act.
If they fail to comply, well, I need a new carpet anyway. But there are rules.
And then I would call 911, after. I am not wasting time with a cell phone while I have an intruder in my house.
Call 911 and then take the Beretta out and crouch down at the end of my bed and wait for the door to open or for the police to arrive.
The person who attempted to murder me in my own home 12 years ago is out of prison now, she is not getting a second chance.
Heh. I forgot all about it until you mentioned this, but I had a police officer enter my home once. It was during the day though, not at night.
I have my office / computer room in the basement. I was wearing headphones and didn’t hear the officer until he came into the basement. He asked if everything was ok. I was like uh, everything is fine, why? He said that they had received a 911 call from our home. I went upstairs and found that our dog had managed to grab the cordless phone off of the coffee table and was chewing on it.
The officer had his hand on his gun but hadn’t drawn it out of its holster.
That’s almost never the case at night in my house. I think there’ve been only four nights in the past 15 years that I’ve spent the night alone here. The Firebug sleeps in another bedroom, but he’s a night owl and frequently goes downstairs to fix a snack in the middle of the night.
If my wife is having trouble sleeping, she will go downstairs and try to go to sleep in her recliner in the living room.
If my early a.m. insomnia hits (which it does frequently), I’ll go downstairs and try to go back to sleep in the guest room.
So if someone’s moving around in the house and it’s not me, it’s almost certainly my wife or son. Or one of the cats.
We have bars or deadbolts on all our doors, and our windows lock securely. Someone would have to break a double-pane window or a solid wood door to break into our house. That noise would probably both wake us all up and scare off the intruder.
In short, I would assume that any normal-sounding noises in the house at night were either my wife or son, or one of the cats. I’d listen a bit more, and then probably just go back to sleep if I didn’t hear anything more.
ETA: I have never owned a firearm, and unless the world changes dramatically, I never will.