First off, I live in New Jersey and the law is stacked in the intruder’s favor. Hollowpoint ammunition is illegal to use in self-defense by a private citizen. Thankfully, defense rounds are available which are not classified as hollowpoint, so I keep a magazine with six Federal personal defense TAP rounds in it. My pistol is in a locked case in my closet with the ammo in a separate case. I have calculated that it takes me 30 seconds in a no-stress situation to be cocked and locked from the time I open the closet door. I would guess that in a real-life situation I could do the same in 30 - 60 seconds. Our family has a defense plan in case of an intruder while we are sleeping.
My wife’s job is to use the cell phone to call 911 while I get the pistol ready. She informs the 911 operator that I am armed and provides my physical description. Once I am armed, she follows me out of the bedroom holding the 2 dogs (large German Shepherds) and goes immediately into my daughter’s room next door with the dogs. She stays on the phone with 911 to keep the police informed of where I am and to let me know when they have arrived. After clearing the spare bedroom and the bathroom in the hall, I go to the top of the stairs and wait for the intruder to show himself or the police to arrive. The way my house is laid out, the bedrooms are in a separate part of the split level house. This plan gives me a legal defense if I have to shoot someone, because there’s no way I can shoot a retreating intruder - only one that is clearly on the ingress to the part of the house where my family is. Since we called the police prior to taking any action, any shooting that I do is a last resort and clearly defensive. If the intruder hasn’t fled due to the dogs’ barking and comes into my line of fire, I WILL drop him/her with 2 shots to center body mass. Again the layout of my house helps me, because I know that my loved ones are behind me and I don’t have to worry about overpenetrating and hitting them. Because of the depressed angle of fire, I also prevent an overpenetrating shot from making it to any of my neighbors. If an attorney wants to make the case that since I have a defense plan I was laying wait to ambush an intruder and the shooting was premeditated, I welcome the opportunity to defend the inalienable right to self-defense in court.
Cite? The penal code here lists a whole slew of things you can legitimately use deadly force on, trespassing is not one of them. Also, most of the things that it says you can shoot someone for while you wouldnt go to jail for (you would go before a grand jury and the attorney fees would eat you alive) you are still civily liable for. For example, if someone is vandalizing your car after dark on your property you could shoot them and maybe not go to jail but you would most likely be sued by the persons family and lose.
That’s the reason my shotgun is nicknamed “Fluffy.” If I ever have to use it in that situation, I don’t want to be on the stand admitting that I named a gun “Killer” or “The Terminator” or something like that. If the prosecutor wants to run with “Fluffy,” more power to him!
Home invasions are vanishingly rare almost everywhere, despite intense media attention when they happen. They’re especially rare in my neck of the woods.
Drunk people entering the wrong homes, kids playing around, neighbors locked out of their house and looking for a phone, or with an emergency and looking for ME, my spouse home unexpectedly from work, surprise party guests or old friends “surprising” me – all of these things are forseeable, and almost any of them seems more likely to me than a burglar – some far more likely.
So if there’s no weapon present, I’m not going to do anything except wait for an explanation. Otherwise, I’m going to evaluate whether I can get away or not – superior firepower or not, confrontations are unpredicable, and the universe does not protect the “good guy.” Get back in my bedroom, bar the door, and use a cell phone to call people actually paid to deal with criminals.
Forced to actually take action, I’ll shoot to kill (with the gun the assailant tosses to me, apparently) only if the other person has a gun or hostage – I don’t have the skill to shoot to disarm. But otherwise, frighten or wound. I’ll take action to try and identify the person if they run (description, license plate, whatever). But in general, I’m not going to kill somebody who presents minimal danger to me, when all I know about them is that they might have made a bad decision.
Actually with a grand jury I don’t believe you can have counsel to represent you. A grand jury isn’t there for you to get a chance to defend yourself, it’s there to force the prosecutor to demonstrate to an “impartial panel of citizens” that he has some justification for moving to prosecute you and it is not just a frivolous act on his part.
In most states I don’t even think there is a grand jury, I think a preliminary hearing before a judge serves that purpose.
If you kill someone in your home the most important thing is being able to show that you had either a good reason to fear for your life, or were so scared/nervous that you shouldn’t be held to the same standards as a rational person.
Prosecutors are people too. Most of the time if you give a good statement to the police, and they really believe it was self-defense, they aren’t going to try to railroad you and may end up not indicting you at all.
If you shoot someone in the back, it’s an uphill battle, though.
I dont believe in handguns, you never know where the bullets go. If someone broke in, i have a nice alumumin bat under my bed and they are going to get the beathing of their life.
If you break into my house while I’m home, where I live with my precious, precious babies, you’re not going out the way you came in. Unless you came in with a nice tight grouping of entry wounds, center mass. In that case, I guess, yeah, you’re going out the way you came in.
I was taught to shoot to stop. I’m not shooting you in any extremities, at least not intentionally.
I’d cock the weapon, point it at center mass, order them to raise their hands and lie face down on the floor in an X position, ask them if they are alone and inform them “If you lie and there is another person here, rest assured that you are dead”. I’d then have him fill out a questionairre on his and his family’s medical history, seal him in a hygienic room reserved for such occasions in my basement and use him to perform medical experimentation that could conceivably benefit humanity and make for really cool cocktail conversation, or call the cops, unless there were two of them and they were cute in which case I’d direct them in a porn video and have them sign away 50% of their interests in the proceeds to rehabilitation charities. Ideally we’d all become friends and have a good laugh about it years later.
All the posts in this thread to the contrary, I expect this would be a typical response. I have no doubt some of the people in here – Martin Hyde, GWVet, and others with seeming experience in somewhat similar situations – really would react somewhat coolly under pressure but they’re exceptions.
I, personally, would be hiding in the closet with a blanket over my head.
Sure didn’t stop my family and others’ from getting robbed any number of times while I was growing up despite living in an area full of gun enthusiasts.
I’m assuming in my statements that we’re going along with the premise of the OP, that it is a situation where you have the ability to defend yourself reasonably.
If I walked in on armed criminals and I was unarmed, I’d not actively try to resist them, my life isn’t worth some junk. Now, if I was under the impression they were going to kill me, I’d do my best to try and run away or if I thought that wouldn’t work disarm them somehow.
I’ve been burgled (hee hee) twice. Neither time was I home.
I do have those…I don’t know what they’re called…sleep paralysis/half dream/half awake deals where I think someone is breaking in. It can be so hard to wake me up. And sometimes I swear I’m up and walking around, and it turns out I’m just dreaming.
Because of that, I’ll never own a gun. I just think it would be a bad scene.
But you know what? I almost salivate when it comes to thinking about catching an intruder. I’d love to beat the shit out of him with a baseball bat.
And then what?
Anyway, if I had a gun, and there was an intruder, and I was awake, I’d yell at him to get down, but…I doubt it would all work out so well. I’m in the big city and they burgle for meth money. They’re tanked up. They don’t care. They’ve nothing to lose. I’m glad I was gone those other two times.
BTW, the alarm scared them off both times…I’ve lost very little.
Oops, I actually combined the two types of defense round I was shopping for :smack: . My Federal rounds are not TAP rounds but are Expanding Full Metal Jacket rounds. It consists of a hollow point lead bullet completely encased in a copper jacket, which covers the hollow point. It looks like a flat nose bullet and doesn’t meet the legal definition of a hollowpoint bullet in NJ.
Hornady’s TAP rounds which Silenus linked to are the other type of defense ammo I was looking at. I wasn’t able to find a dealer with enough in stock for me to test them for reliability, so I went with the Federal. I shot 100 of the Federal rounds at the range without a misfeed or a jam, so I’m pretty confident that my pistol will feed them reliably.
No one knows how they’ll react under pressure until they have done so. That’s why I have a defense plan, so at least I have a guideline to follow. There’s an old military saying - “no plan ever survives first contact.” Most combat veterans I know agree that it’s a truism. Devising a plan means imagining a scenario, but the scenario any plan is based on isn’t real. I really honestly hope that I never have to use any weapon in self-defense, and the odds are certainly in favor of it not being necessary. I believe that if it ever does become necessary, I have the bases covered to keep my family safe, because that is my only objective in such a scenario.
I don’t have experience in similar situations. I am a wartime veteran, but I was not in the infantry. My only experience in personal combat has been in training. I spent the active combat phase of Desert Storm in a P-3 Orion aircraft, which thankfully never went down in a hostile area. If anything, I think the only advantage my military training provides me in the area of home defense is that I believe that I do have the mental toughness to follow through and shoot an intruder that is a threat to my family. That said, no one can predict how they will act or react when they are snooted to the gills on adrenalin - all you can do is try to prepare yourself so that you keep your loved ones safe.
