A Girl’s Best Friend
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I had a home invasion in Jersey City in May. I woke to a sound outside the house. Two minutes later the front door exploded in the noise sense, as a deadbolt and two lesser locks gave way. He or they then faced windows alarms/ a door guard blocking the door down to a 9 inch opening/ and me with a 12 gauge shotgun exposing my position too much ( next time I won’t enter the front area at all…but it was my first 2AM home invasion…and there’s a learning curve).
Mossberg 12 gauge and God both…were my army as He has been my shield in 9 such moments throughout life.
I use #8 birdshot based on youtube demonstrations that it will wreck an enemy at 15’ but be safer on distant neighbors as it degrades with distance and walls. I have two double ot’s on the stock in case faced with a 300 lb. man as I was faced with once on a Manhattan Street….yes…God came to the rescue there too. Dude challenged me twice to a fight and I measured off the distance for a running side kick, got set but also slid my hand into my pocket toward a mace spray…which he thought was a gun and he ran away.
Thank you Lord…he had forearms like my thighs. Two months later I saw an article in the NY paper that a homeless man on the West side called big Mike was set on fire and killed by two pimps. I said a prayer for him…but that day, he picked on the wrong dudes to challenge. Home invasion? Have multiple obstacles…buttress the door if you have a nearby anchor point…and a shotgun..but practice…we’re not talking about the game…we’re talking about practice…practice….
Only took a large, aggressive homeless guy cornering me while I was trying to load the kids and groceries before I started packing constantly around Seattle. (There were several folks who were obviously watching, one guy circled us like five times in his car which is probably why the homeless guy left relatively easily.)
Scary thing is? I stopped packing most of the time in El Paso, because finding a class that works with having a ton of kids and no sitter was too big of a hurdle, especially since a about half of the places in town you cannot legally carry; by the time I had enough of a support network to even consider it, we were already moving.
Iowa accepts a DD2-14, and there’s a wider range of private options, too. So the diaper bag of defense is back. (Not like it’s any harder to guard than the medications I have to carry.)
about half the places in [El Paso] you cannot legally carry
If only that Wal-Mart had been in one of those safe places instead of a free fire zone like the corner of Chicago Street and West Baltimore Avenue. This whole senseless tragedy might have been avoided.
Or, I dunno, given the sad state of education these days, maybe the killer didn’t realize he was walking into a gun free zone.