IN DEFENSE OF THE HOME PATRICK KILCHERMANN IN DEFENSE OF THE HOME
A Home Owner’s Practical Guide To Preventing Burglaries, Hardening Homes, and Defending Oneself and Their Families Against Violent Intruders
Patrick Kilchermann
Concealed Carry University IN DEFENSE OF THE HOME Patrick Kilchermann
© 2020 Concealed Carry University
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of any licence permitting lim- ited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
Published by: Concealed Carry University, LLC 336 W 1st St St #113 Flint, MI 48502-1330 For my wife, that you will someday know that the only thing special or remarkable about me was the extent to which I was fueled by your faith in me.
For my son, that - when blessed with the certain knowledge of what must be done - you will have the courage and strength to do it without hesitation.
For my daughters, that you will hold the men in your lives to the highest of standards, that you will trust them when they’ve earned it, and that you will stand by them when they fall.
For the CCU alumni: I can’t imagine a greater blessing than to live a life of helping you fulfill your roles more wisely, more prudently, and more decisively. Thank you for the opportunity.
Patrick Kilchermann, March 2020 DISCLAIMER:
[From Pat]
Here, I am legally obligated to print a disclaimer. I am supposed to tell you that I can’t give you advice, and that the information inside of this book should only be used for reference. So: that’s what I’m telling you.
You know that every situation is unique, and only the brains inside the boots (or bare feet) on the ground can be trusted to make those critical judgement calls. But it is my intention to arm you with what you need for that moment.
Every single word inside this book describes what I do, how I do it, and why I do it.
I don’t want you to merely survive. I want you to WIN. So be safe. Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
11. CHAPTER 1: WHY NOW?
14. CHAPTER 2: A FULL STATE OF READINESS
LAYER 1: PASSIVE DETERRENCE MEASURES
17. CHAPTER 3: PASSIVE DETERRENCE
21. CHAPTER 4: PASSIVE DETERRENCE STRATEGIES FOR YOUR HOME AND PROPERTY
LAYER 2: ACTIVE DETERRENCE MEASURES
28. CHAPTER 5: ACTIVE DETERRENCE
29. CHAPTER 6: ACTIVE DETERRENCE STRATEGIES
LAYER 3: PASSIVE DEFENSE MEASURES
37. CHAPTER 7: PASSIVE DEFENSE
41. CHAPTER 8: THE (ONLY) TWO ROLES OF PASSIVE DEFENSE MEASURES
43. CHAPTER 9: DOOR AND WINDOW LOCK MUSTS
52. CHAPTER 10: SUPERCHARGED DOOR AND WINDOW LOCKS
57. CHAPTER 11: ALARM SYSTEMS
63. CHAPTER 12: INTERIOR MOTION LIGHTS 64. CHAPTER 13: HOW TO AVOID INSTANTLY MAKING YOUR PASSIVE DEFENSE MEASURES COMPLETE USELESS TO YOU
LAYER 4: ACTIVE DEFENSE MEASURES
69. CHAPTER 14: AN INTRODUCTION TO ACTIVE DEFENSE MEASURES
72. CHAPTER 15: ALERT TIME: HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?
76. CHAPTER 16: THE MOST DANGEROUS COMMON DENOMINATOR
78. CHAPTER 17: THE IMPORTANCE OF RESPONDING TO OUR INTUITION
78. CHAPTER 18: A LIGHTNING-FAST RESPONSE
79. CHAPTER 19: GEARING UP: THE TOOLS YOU WILL NEED
82. CHAPTER 20: ONE-HANDED SHOOTING PRACTICE & PRACTICING IN THE DARK
83. CHAPTER 21: LONG GUNS: SHOTGUNS OR RIFLES?
84. CHAPTER 22: ALARM SCENARIOS vs DANGER SCENARIOS
85. CHAPTER 23: CLEARING YOUR HOUSE vs. STAYING PUT
89. CHAPTER 24: THE DANGERS OF MOVING AROUND WITHIN YOUR HOME
90. CHAPTER 25: WHY WE CAN RARELY AFFORD TO ‘STAY PUT’ DURING AN ‘ALARM SCENARIO.’
92. CHAPTER 26: THE “INITIAL REACTIVE DEFENSIVE POINT”
93. CHAPTER 27: MOVING TO YOUR “INITIAL REACTIVE DEFENSIVE POINT”
94. CHAPTER 28: A NOTE ON DAYTIME BURGLARIES OR DAYTIME HOME INVASIONS 98. CHAPTER 29: HOME DEFENSE WEAPONS DURING THE DAYTIME
100. CHAPTER 30: HOW TO SAFELY STORE A HANDGUN THROUGHOUT YOUR HOME
104. CHAPTER 31: FINAL NOTES ON DAYLIGHT HOUR HOME INVASIONS
109. CHAPTER 32: BEGINNING A SCENARIO: THE BUMP IN THE NIGHT
110. CHAPTER 33: THE CRITICAL NEED FOR BEING “SWITCHED ON”
112. CHAPTER 34: TACTICS
113. CHAPTER 35: TACTICAL MOVEMENT
118. CHAPTER 36: TACTICAL MOVEMENT INDOORS
120. CHAPTER 37: TACTICAL MOVEMENT INDOORS WITH A HANDGUN
122. CHAPTER 38: FIREARM SAFETY WHILE CLEARING YOUR HOUSE
124. CHAPTER 39: WHERE TO POINT YOUR GUN WHILE CLEARING YOUR HOUSE
128. CHAPTER 40: WEAPON RETENTION WHILE CLEARING YOUR HOME
132. CHAPTER 41: MOVING THROUGH DOORWAYS
133. CHAPTER 42: KEEP YOUR WEAPON WHERE YOU CAN CONTROL IT
135. CHAPTER 43: REELING AND PUSHING YOUR PISTOL: RETENTION vs ACCURACY
137. CHAPTER 44: BE A MOVING TARGET 139. CHAPTER 45: TO AND FROM YOUR INITIAL REACTIVE DEFENSIVE POINT: YOUR FIRST STEPS
141. CHAPTER 46: TAKING A ‘PRUDENT PAUSE’ FOR SITUATIONAL AWARENESS AND ANALYSIS
144. CHAPTER 47: WHY WE TAKE PRUDENT PAUSES
145. CHAPTER 48: HOW LONG TO PAUSE
146. CHAPTER 49: WHAT DO YOU DO WHILE PAUSING FOR THE SAKE OF SITUATIONAL AWARENESS AND ANALYSIS?
151. CHAPTER 50: CALLING THE POLICE: WHEN AND WHERE AND HOW
152. CHAPTER 51: USING A FLASHLIGHT TO CLEAR YOUR HOUSE
153. CHAPTER 52: STEALTH VS. INTIMIDATION: THE 2 SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT, AND THE 2 OFFENSIVE POSTURES OF HOME CLEARING
155. CHAPTER 53: THE INTIMIDATING HOUSE CLEARING POSTURE
161. CHAPTER 54: THE STEALTH POSTURE OF HOME CLEARING
165. CHAPTER 55: THE 3 CRITICAL DON’Ts OF ENGAGING INTRUDERS
166. CHAPTER 56: CLEARING YOUR HOUSE WITH FLASHLIGHTS
167. CHAPTER 57: WHICH FLASHLIGHT TO CHOOSE
170. CHAPTER 58: TACTICAL MOVEMENT INDOORS, WITH A FLASHLIGHT, AND WITH A HANDGUN
171. CHAPTER 59: THE 2 WAYS TO HOLD YOUR FLASHLIGHT WHILE CLEARING YOUR HOUSE 172. CHAPTER 60: HOW AND WHEN TO USE YOUR FLASHLIGHT
175. CHAPTER 61: HAVING TWO FLASHLIGHTS
176. CHAPTER 62: LASERS
177. CHAPTER 63: TACTICAL MOVEMENT INDOORS WITH A LONG GUN
180. CHAPTER 64: THE HIERARCHY OF PROTECTION AND CLEARING: WHAT ORDER DO YOU CLEAR THE ROOMS IN YOUR HOUSE?
183. CHAPTER 65: TACTICAL PROBLEMS
185. CHAPTER 66: SOLVING TACTICAL PROBLEMS
187. CHAPTER 67: THE “DANGER” SCENARIO
188. CHAPTER 68: WHY WE DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN DANGER AND ALARM SCENARIOS
191. CHAPTER 69: WHAT TO SAY TO THE POLICE WHEN YOU NEED TO CALL FOR BACKUP
193. CHAPTER 70: ARMING YOUR LOVED ONES IN THE MOMENT
194. CHAPTER 71: HOW TO FIGHT
CONCLUSION INTRODUCTION
The defense of your home is one of the most ancient, natural, and universally respected of human rights.
Whereas the circumstances involving defensive uses of force when out and about are often muddled or convoluted to some degree (who was truly the aggressor? Did the victim instigate? Could the situation have been avoided?), where home defense is concerned nearly all ambiguity is gone: in fact, it’s hard to conjure up a more universal human phobia than to wake up and find an uninvited stranger, dressed in dark clothing and holding a weapon, inside your home.
Out and about, varying social customs and the misinterpretation of your own behavior ensures that you can expect your personal space to be violated and your senses to be offended quite regularly. But your home is your castle. Your sanctuary. Your private space. For most of you, only your most intimate guests will ever enter this space, and even then, only after having received an express invitation (and, often, you are usually somewhat relieved to see them go!).
Home defense is therefore one of the most basic needs a person can have, and yet, to execute effective home defense is not as simple as one would imagine.
Old clichés such as “the sound of a 12-gauge shotgun cycling is the best home burglary system in the world” leave you suddenly hanging high and dry when, for example, that threat DOESN’T turn tail and bolt at this supposedly menacing sound. Even more alarming are the reasons why he might not be running.
Perhaps he has been ‘casing’ you and your house for days; perhaps he has predicted that you would be armed; perhaps he isn’t intimidated by this reality because he’s either certain he can win or is so desperate that he’s willing to take his chances. Not to mention the additional considerations that, in this day and age, it’s entirely possible this threat will significantly outgun a pump shotgun… and in certain times and certain crises, the sound of a pump shotgun cycling may in fact cause a barrage of rifle rounds to begin flying through the paper-thin walls of your house.
Even aside from this new level of especially brutal
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 9 violence, there are other tactical concerns that can confound you when you think there might be (or know there are) intruders in your house:
» Do you stay put and hunker down or do you move and clear your house?
» What’s the best way to stay put?
» What’s the best way to clear a house?
» What tools do you need to have on your person right then?
» What tools do you not want to have on your person?
» Do you make noise and announce your armed presence, or do you stay silent and stealthy? Why?
» What can be done ahead of time to help make your job easier in those moments - and, perhaps even more importantly, what can be done ahead of time to prevent a burglary or home invasion to begin with?
Even on top of those excellent questions there are realistic and practical concerns that demand you take pause before sticking a pistol, shotgun, or rifle into your bedroom and call it good. When you dig, you’ll find that for every one of these practical concerns there are life-saving tips and answers that easily justify spending these couple of
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 10 hours to ensure that you are as equipped and prepared as possible for when you must arm yourself to investigate those “bumps in the night.”
CHAPTER 1: WHY NOW?
One of the unfortunate realities of this day and age is that there have had to be entirely new categories designated for crimes that were, previously, so rare as to be unheard of.
In this way, a “home invasion” is a relatively new concept. Even though it’s true that there’s nothing new under the sun, and even though home burglary has been around for as long as homes have been built, the notion that an entirely new and increasingly common crop of man would dare to storm into another person’s house while they are home was justifiably frightening to many when crimes of this exact nature first began to occur. And yet, begin they have – and the occurrence of the modern home invasion only continues to rise.
Why? There are a number of reasons why a criminal
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 11 would prefer you were in the house when he committed his crime. The biggest two are: because he needs you to point out or unlock the areas where the valuables are kept, or because it is not the valuables that he wants, but you, your spouse and/or children.
As the occurrence of home invasions have increased, so has the level of violence used within them. Consider the example of Dr. William Petit of Connecticut who awoke to a nightmare at 3am under the realization that he was being beaten in the head with a baseball bat, covered in blood. He heard one man say: “If he moves, put a bullet in him,” before having his wrists and ankles bound with zip ties. Little did the good doctor know that his wife and two daughters had already been beaten, bound, and gagged, with pillowcases pulled over their faces.
The two home invaders claimed to be interested only in a robbery and demanded to know where his safe was and how to open it. Dr. Petit tried explaining through his pounding and bleeding head that there was no safe. Enraged, the burglars ransacked the house, only managing to find around $100.
To make a long and truly horrendous story short, this family was put through a hellish nightmare filled with indescribable sorrow, in which this man’s wife and 17- and 11-year-old daughters were raped before being doused with gasoline and set on fire. He himself barely managed to escape from the basement where he was left to die, as his house burst into flames.
This story, and dozens more that I can, personally, recall in gruesome detail without even needing to revisit their
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 12 sources, reminds me of the critical need to put in place the kinds of layers of security that can alert one to the presence of these kinds of threats, buy the critical seconds necessary to mount an effective defense, have the right tools on hand for the job, and make sure that you have the skills that are required to protect those who depend upon you when they are most vulnerable.
You are likely well acquainted with the inevitable social and economic ramifications of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). Plenty of worst-case scenarios come to mind where no longer is one solely concerned with the common criminal, but where history has shown that in similar scenarios (should these situations be drawn out long enough) otherwise peaceful and civilized people may, through desperation in the plight of their own families, be pushed toward robbery or even brutal murder to get what they think they need for survival.
Hope and pray that your country and community will rise to the occasion in solidarity and charity, but keep in mind that a great number of civilizations throughout ancient and very near history show that these worst-case scenarios are by no means fantastical or alarmist. Mass panic is a highly dangerous and volatile animal.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 13 So: if you agree that your home is your castle; if you are willing and eager to keep your safe haven hardened against all threats – and if you want to achieve these goals in ways that are as safe for you and as dangerous to your opposition as possible – then I invite you to read on with me and study this engrossing and indispensable topic.
By the time you finish this educational piece, I know that you will have the mental and physical tools and abilities necessary to fight circles around anybody who would dare enter your home with violent, sadistic, or murderous intent.
CHAPTER 2: A FULL STATE OF READINESS
The Guardian need not fear. Of the 127 million dwellings in the United States, there is absolutely no reason why your dwelling must be one of those relatively few picked for burglary or invasion. There’s a lot you can do to dramatically lower those odds, and, in this guide, I’m going to cover almost every strategy worth the effort. Regardless: should these deterrence efforts fail, and should your house indeed be selected for an attack, there is absolutely no reason why you can’t retain all the advantage in that situation. There is no reason why you can’t repel them, why you can’t survive, or why you can’t win.
You will. And here’s how you are going to tackle this:
First is this guide, and afterward is the demonstrative
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 14 video. That’s where I’m going to work to display the tactics, movements, and skills that you’re going to need.
But first is this guide, and within it, I will first discuss “Passive Deterrence Strategies.” These are things that you can do to and around your house to make it a lot less likely that you’ll ever be targeted for an attack.
Next, we will discuss “Active Deterrence strategies.” These are things you can have prepared, with regard to your house, that can actually thwart a crime in progress before the criminal actually gains entry into your home.
Then, I will discuss “Passive Defense Measures.” These are measures you can take ahead of time to help deflect or delay a committed attacker / invader, and things that, in doing so, can also alert you to their presence ahead of time.
Finally, of course, we will be discussing “Active Defense Measures.” This is how you will take decisive, hands-on action against the invader that is either trying to break inside or has already entered your home.
One important note before I dive in: This short, educational course is not intended to be a definitive guide on home defense. You can believe me when I say that my devotion to this subject has always had me eager to make a total training curriculum on the topic of home defense. In fact,
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 15 I have within my project files from 2014 a massive outline to do just that.
Coincidentally (or not) I also have what I believe to be an exciting outline for a general emergency and disaster preparedness curriculum. Both are topics that I have wanted to explore more in depth for many years, however, with the understanding and knowledge that sometimes the most helpful resource is the one you have NOW instead of later, I wanted to put together this guide to give you the greatest advantage for the coming months.
With that said… Let’s begin.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 16 LAYER 1: PASSIVE DETERRENCE MEASURES
CHAPTER 3: PASSIVE DETERRENCE
To deter a threat is to prevent there from ever having been a threat in the first place. So passive deterrence strategies, then, are the ways that you can prevent an attack from ever taking place without even knowing that you have done so.
That means that these strategies are your very first and arguably most important layer of defense (but they’re also the most boring!). So, hang in there and put as much of this into action as possible.
The whole idea of passive deterrence is that you don’t
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 17 have to deter a criminal from a life of crime or even change his plans to break into your house to get what he wants. Your job is wildly easier than that. In fact, all you have to do is cause him to simply choose someone else’s house instead of yours! Ideally, other people will follow suit with your practices and eventually your whole neighborhood will be as hard of a target as your house… would-be criminals will simply pass through without giving any of your houses a second glance. But at the very least, you want them to pass over your house.
The key to doing this lies within these three opportunities:
» Make your house look like a less attractive target than your neighbors’ houses…
» Make it look like a harder target than your neighbors’ houses… and,
» Make it look like a riskier target than your neighbors’ houses.
And all of this comes back to simple common sense. Just look at your neighbors’ houses through the eyes of a criminal. Compare their house to yours, and then do the opposite of what your human pride often demands; see how you can make your house and property look like less valuable targets than those around you.
It could be as simple as parking your nicer vehicles in your garage and leaving the more modest ones out front. It could involve installing a simpler mailbox or using plain, black house numbers instead of flashy gold. Every
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 18 neighborhood and every street have their own personality and feel, so it would be unhelpful for me to give too many ideas here. For the family living in a $2M mansion the strategies will differ from the family living in the rural $200k house.
Where a “Beware of Dog” sign or a cord of split wood out front might be enough to sway an invader without taking away from the beauty of your home in the country, the wealthier suburban house might require some very subtle design elements to project the feelings of strength, self-reliance, and independence into the mind of the would-be invader – such as a pointed wrought iron gate or fence, an illuminated and well- maintained American flag, a dramatically lit entryway, or an imposing deadbolt lock on the front door that can be seen from the road.
Almost without exception, criminals and home invaders would prefer not to tangle with young, healthy, and fit people. Namely: any armed individual (male or female), or any unarmed man who is aware and fit.
You can be as intimidating at age 75 as you can at age 35, and you can strategically arrange the exterior of your house and property in a way that makes this level of awareness, activity, and fitness clear to the casing criminal –and believe me, many of them are indeed paying attention. (When interviewed, a large group of home burglars were
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 19 split at around 50/50: half of them performed surveillance on their targets before their invasion or break in, as they worked to get a feel for the neighborhood activity and the schedules and patterns of the home owner).
The important thing that I want to emphasize here is to focus more on the “philosophical” rather than the “tactical.” Or in other words, focus on absorbing the spirit of these ideas rather than feeling limited to the just these ideas alone. The reason, of course, is because I can’t see your property and I can’t see your neighborhood.
Keep in mind this important point: if you live in an extremely nice neighborhood and you try to employ some of the strategies that are good ideas for somebody in a middle-class neighborhood, you might actually make your house look like a BETTER target, because a casing criminal might conclude that only somebody LESS vigilant would treat their nice, expensive property that way. Similarly, the actual, tactical changes somebody might make in a ritzy, high class neighborhood to make their house look less appealing to a criminal might actually make the middle-class home look MORE appealing to a criminal… so again, you are the judge for these kinds of strategies based on where you are and what your neighborhood looks like.
Keeping in mind and emphasizing the “philosophical,” the following is a big list of ideas that you can put into practice that will help you in this regard. These are things that you can do to or around the exterior of your house or property that will all add up to helping deter threats in this passive way.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 20 CHAPTER 4: PASSIVE DETERRENCE STRATEGIES FOR YOUR HOME AND PROPERTY
» Consider What We Call the ‘Crew Cut Theory’ of home exterior aesthetics (as opposed to shaggy, unkempt hair; and as opposed to an expensive, luxurious haircut). You might benefit from a home that seems modest for your neighborhood, without compromising on class, dignity, or a cleanly presentation. A home that is fit, functional, austere and reserved may very well present the least- attractive potential target to a burglar or home invader.
» Keep your window blinds/curtains closed, especially when you’re not there. Criminals tend to be less motivated to risk a burglary if they aren’t convinced that the target will be worth it.
» Don’t advertise that you have stuff worth taking: for example, the large cardboard box from your recent electronics purchase sitting on the curb… cut it up and bag it instead.
» Similarly, be aware that many criminals have said that seeing NRA stickers (or other stickers implying gun ownership) actually appeal to them more than they repel them. In the words of one robber, NRA stickers says “expensive guns to steal.”
» Demonstrate your vigilance and attentiveness
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 21 by effectively-securing easy targets such as trailer hitches (apply locks to these, or chain them to a tree), sheds, or gates.
» Trim back hedges from windows. Having bushes, shrubs, or other visual cover in or behind which a criminal can hide as he attempts to break and enter is cited by many experts and criminals themselves as a juicy, motivating factor when considering a target home.
» Consider applying window bars if you’re in a particularly rough neighborhood. While these tend draw even more unwanted attention in middle- class or upper-scale neighborhoods, they’re almost expected in rougher areas. Overt signs of protectiveness certainly can cause a criminal to wonder what’s so worth protecting, but in general the cost-to-benefit on these types security devices is worth the effort.
» Work to design into your home’s exterior ambiguity as to whether you are home or not. Some home invaders prefer you to be home. But the vast majority of burglars avoid houses where their occupants are home and attentive. In fact, the #1 most cited piece of advice one group of imprisoned home burglars had for homeowners was to get a cheap radio, stick it in a bathroom near the home’s entrance, and turn the volume up any time we leave our houses.
Almost every single one of them admitted that hearing a radio playing in this way would cause them to turn around and leave immediately, even
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 22 after they broke into the home. Adding to this, my recommendation would be to make sure the radio station chosen would be a talk radio station, and ideally a channel most typically listened to by men.
» Similarly, keeping some interior lights on when you’re away can help to present an image to passers-by that you’re home. That said, this won’t fool those criminals who have the patience to linger in a neighborhood (or around a particular house) to learn its patterns and intricacies. So, to take this piece of advice to a stellar maximum, consider buying and placing what are known as “outlet timers” on a few lamps throughout your house.
These ten-dollar devices can be set to randomize the switching on and off of your lights. During the work day or – especially – while you’re on vacation, these things (including the other tips on this list) can be worth their weight in gold for repelling any trolling burglars.
» If possible, keep a car in your driveway when you’re not there. (A vehicle parked outside your garage, in front of the garage door, is an international sign for ‘I’m at home.’) Strategies like these lose their utility over time when dealing with criminals who hang around the same neighborhood looking for patterns, but again: the shotgun approach to deterrence will create a multitude of layers that will prove to be effective.
» Along these same lines, consider the negative datapoints: that is, in addition to making it appear
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 23 as if you’re home when you’re not, be sure that you don’t cancel these measures out by letting mail or newspapers accumulate – or any other evidence that suggests you’re not home. Have your mail held, or have a friend pick it up and clear any packages off your porch for you.
» You might also consider the age-old advice for placing an alarm system company sign in your yard or sticker on your window - whether you subscribe to it or not. When surveyed, imprisoned burglars had mixed reactions to this idea (many were confident in their ability to bypass, circumvent, or to actually turn off alarm systems. Some were willing to gamble that most systems didn’t report to authorities; but the presence of alarm systems doesn’t seem to entice criminals, so it can’t hurt!).
» Ideally, your home wouldn’t present a criminal with any opportunities for concealment as he worked to break through one of your entry-points. I’ve already mentioned keeping bushes and hedges trimmed back away from your windows, but also consider the down-side of privacy fences. They
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 24 provide privacy for anyone inside the perimeter. The best balance with fences (meaning, the one that a survey of criminals agreed on were the least convenient) appears to be a fence that can be seen through, where 6 foot tall wrought-iron bars were the most intimidating, and a low, waist-height fence coming in second.
The deterrent factor here, cited by them most frequently, was a fear that they would be seen climbing the fence (given that it’s normal to approach a house on foot; not normal to jump or climb a fence), or a fear that they would get hung up on the fence in trying to escape quickly.
» While many criminals aren’t fazed by small dogs (even those who bark), big dogs do have a statistical deterrent effect. Therefore, outside of actually having the dog, taking measures to suggest the presence of a big dog could be effective as well. The classic example is to hang a ‘beware of dog’ sign, but this can be made more real as well: Consider, for example, placing a large dog house in your yard. Or, to leave a few large size and half chewed dog toys around the approach to your house (a bench grinder or band saw can do a
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 25 convincing job).
Something a criminal may find more legitimate than the clichéd ‘Beware of Dog’ sign might be a more subtle sign that suggests a beloved breed; for example, a “Rottweiler Owner Parking Only” sign on your garage, or a “I love my German Shepard” sticker to be left in plain sight, or some small “invisible dog fence” signs.
I also came up with the idea to get reflective thumb tacks, and to apply two of them, low to the ground, at various points around your perimeter. It’s not exactly likely that a criminal will be using his headlights or a flashlight on his approach, but if he is (or during a sweep if he ever cases your house), the sight of two “eyes” reflecting his light back at him (from inside a dog house, or from “in front of” your house, or a tree… this could cause a mild panic if he’s on foot; or a second thought if he’s still casing.
» Exterior lighting is a famous deterrent for criminals, and this classic advice is indeed powerful. Criminals say that they do not want to risk being seen by anyone, and a well-lit house poses an intimidating challenge, especially if there are others nearby that are less well-lit.
» Remember that this isn’t an exhaustive list. All you need to know is the philosophy: “I can avoid having my home targeted for a burglary or invasion by employing certain strategies.” If you know the philosophy, you can write strategy and tactics on the fly.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 26 And finally, remember that there is no “one thing” you can do as a fool proof measure to your house that will cause a criminal to pass it by. That’s just not possible, so it’s not your goal. Instead, your goal is to understand that your home exterior features about 500 data points that the unconscious mind analyzes whenever somebody glances at it.
Some of those data points say, “Wow, this guy is doing alright.” Some of them say, “I wonder what’s the matter with this guy?” Some of them say “a young person lives here.” Others say, “an older person lives here.” Your mind, and the mind of a criminal, will automatically take in the whole and they will perform an average. So, whenever you change anything to do with the exterior of your house, your goal is to keep adding to those columns that suggest, “This is not a good place to try to steal from or within which to commit a crime.”
Every change you make might add a percent or two to those columns, and if you make enough of them, you will cause enough friction in the minds of a criminal that instead of taking a second look, his eyes will narrow and he will continue down the sidewalk or down the road, passing by your place.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 27 LAYER 2: ACTIVE DETERRENCE MEASURES
CHAPTER 5: ACTIVE DETERRENCE
For starters, we should emphasize the difference between passive deterrence strategies and active deterrence strategies.
Deterrence is deterrence: and that is simply the concept of PREVENTING A CRIME before the decision to commit the crime is solidified in the mind of the criminal.
Passive deterrence strategies, as we just discussed, are the ways you can help your house itself to deter criminals. You don’t need to be there for your passive deterrence strategies to work. You don’t even need electricity. Passive strategies are truly passive (and this makes them by far the most reliable!).
Active deterrence strategies, on the other hand, are human or mechanical systems that you can practice and employ to actively intervene WHILE the criminal is looking at your house and making his decision; to change the outcome of that decision in real time.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 28 CHAPTER 6: ACTIVE DETERRENCE STRATEGIES
Some examples of active deterrence strategies that you can employ are:
» Leveraging your physical presence. Being visible while in an active or vigilant state when the criminal looks at you or your house could cause him to pass your home up, even if it were a comparatively lucrative target for the area. Now, this COULD potentially go either way. For example, if you are disabled and must get around on an outdoor scooter, being seen might increase your odds of being targeted for a home invasion. But in most cases, your well-timed and alert, assertive presence will help immensely.
» Even better than simply being seen while active, is if the potential invader or burglar understands that you’ve seen them. You can do this by returning eye contact with anyone who glances in your direction while passing by your house.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 29
Consider this: The vast majority of travelers do not pay close attention to the houses or people in the neighborhoods they are driving by. Now certainly, they might: There are plenty of potential situations where they could that are perfectly legitimate. For example, if they are prospective buyers looking at homes in the area. But we can trust that nobody goes on prospective home buying pleasure cruises during times of national crisis or regional disaster.
We can also generally accurately profile the types of vehicles and people who have a legitimate reason to be in your neighborhood or not. By letting these kinds of people who do not belong see that you have seen them, you could not only save your house from being targeted, but every house in your neighborhood. This kind of active deterrence can be as simple as a steady stare at a passing motorist while you are out doing yard work if you feel their vehicle or appearance doesn’t belong in your neighborhood.
In the event of a major regional disaster (such as a hurricane-caused power outage which has sent suspicious work vans and pick-up trucks trolling through various neighborhoods), it may require a more active posture: spending long periods of time posted on your front porch, watching the street and side yards. This particular active deterrence strategy can look like anything between these two extremes.
» To emphasize this point about your presence and a connection between you and a potential assailant, consider this reality: When a group of 80 prison
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 30 inmates incarcerated for burglary were interviewed, literally 100% of them said that they used to knock on the front door of a home before breaking and entering.
If a home owner happened to be home, the criminals would usually make up some excuse for why he had the wrong house before leaving. Maybe it was a fictitious Craigslist ad. Maybe they were looking for someone who lived in the area. Maybe they claimed to have car trouble. In any case, if you’re ever bothered at home by someone who is no longer interested once you answer the door, keep in mind that they might be a criminal. Look them directly in the eye, and tell them that you’re always home, and that you’ll keep your eye out for whatever it is that you’re looking for.
» Operational Security: Keep in mind that many (but not all) criminals will ‘case’ a home before targeting it for attack. We’ve read reports of crimes and interviews with criminals where the criminal reported elaborate ruses designed to get inside a home to scope it out for valuables as he made his decision. In still many other instances, a potential burglar or invader would approach a house while
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 31 posing as a political or corporate surveyor, and use this opportunity to get close to your house to peer inside windows or to look around the homeowner as they talked at the door. If what the criminal could see might make for a lucrative haul, he would select the house as a target.
The concept of Operational Security is used militarily to caution members of a unit over not sharing their mission plans or unit details with anyone they do not trust. Reason being: That old phrase, ‘Loose lips sink ships,’ which refers back to when foreign spies would watch American harbors and report back to their home countries when ships or convoys would leave port. Well, when soldiers and sailors would carouse in the port town bars, the same things would happen. Clever spies would ply them with alcohol and pump them for information on what their units would be up to.
With regards to home defense, Operational Security means: keep valuables hidden, and take an assertive, proactive stance where deliverymen or solicitors or utility workers or political activists are concerned. Be especially aware if these people seem more interested in what’s over your shoulder than your eyes.
And, to take Operational Security for home defense even more literally, consider not telling your friends about your recent precious metal purchase, or your plans for squirreling away a bunch of cash for the next natural disaster. You may also not want to burden your own children with this knowledge; for you never know what might end up as playground or locker room gossip or boasting, and you never know what kind of men your
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 32 children’s friends have for fathers. You never know in whose hands that information might end up in.
» The next active deterrence strategy worth looking at is a step down from getting visual contact, but it’s worth mentioning if it’s a possibility for you: a watchdog. The right kind of dog positioned outside on your property or inside your house has the potential to serve as both an active deterrent and even an active defense measure, which we will talk about next. Whether the criminal is afraid of dogs or not, their intuitive conclusion upon seeing a well-built dog perk up and raise his head and watch them drive or walk by could be “not worth it” or even evoke a response such as “I’m glad I saw that thing now and not later.”
Watchdogs are not perfect, and they are not fool proof. They will not stop the most determined threat, because even a well-built, purposefully bred watchdog is no match for a full-grown man with or without a firearm – a baseball bat or crowbar is more than enough to silence one of these loyal companions forever. But they can help and be another layer of security.
» Another active deterrence strategy worth mentioning is motion activated security lighting. As with dogs, these are by no means a safeguard. Any determined or seasoned criminal or invader will see them ahead of time, will understand what they are, will have contingency plans for how to avoid them, and will have timed or coordinated their attack in such a way that they just won’t
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 33 care. If the power goes out and you do not have a generator… they are a moot point, but the value of motion lights is always present, and sometimes it can make all the difference.
In their most basic role, security and motion lights provide a passive deterrence in that they forewarn criminals that you have considered them. But in their active role, they can surprise and illuminate potential threats. Remember that criminals rely on both privacy and time to be able to commit their crimes. They do not want to be seen.
If you live in a neighborhood with plenty of houses and lots of windows, and every possible entrance into your home is well lit, it will take an extremely rare criminal who would be willing to stand in the light for the amount of time that it would take them to gain access through a window or a door – even with the off chance that at 4am a neighbor could be watching through one of the black windows, silently dialing 911 or even calling and alerting the neighbor whose house they are watching. It’s important to note here that if you live rurally and there is nobody to see the illuminated threat, then they probably won’t care whether they are lit up or not!
Still: The sudden illumination of a security motion
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 34 light can trip a panic switch in the mind of a criminal; the reliable illumination of your paths of approach and points of entry, even without panic, can frustrate and dissuade a criminal from continuing with their plans.
» Security camera systems can similarly provide both a passive deterrence benefit as well as an active one. Meaning: they can discourage potential criminals by their visual presence, and they can repel committed criminals on their approach to your perimeter if they failed to see them until that moment.
Now, at worst, a criminal might see security cameras as a sign that there are things inside worth stealing. But at best, the criminal will assume if they see one camera that there is at least another that they haven’t been able to see. But they may not always see them.
Or, they may assume that you are not monitoring the cameras. Or, they may be confident in their ability to get in and destroy or remove the centralized recording device. Or, most realistically: they may be disguised and simply not care whether they’re recorded. In any case, cameras are not as
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 35 effective as motion security lighting because even a disguised criminal needs time for a home invasion. It’s hard to find the valuables inside the house! There’s no such thing as a super quick grab and go. They need to be able to look around at least for 8 or 10 minutes, and the more time they get, the more valuable their haul will be.
If they think the cops might have been alerted on the approach up to your house, the possibility of disengagement is very high, but the mere presence of a security camera has very little active deterrence value in this regard.
Remember that this, too, is not intended to be an exhaustive list of ideas for active deterrence strategies or measures that we can take – and just as importantly, remember that there is no one surefire or foolproof tip or trick to making sure a robber passes by your house. Every criminal is a unique person, and each will be motivated by or repulsed by different things.
As always, we can rely only on a ‘shotgun approach’, where adding layer upon layer of strategies and measures like these will, once a ‘critical mass’ is reached, ensure that your house makes an unattractive target to a broad swath of criminals.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 36 LAYER 3: PASSIVE DEFENSE MEASURES
CHAPTER 7: PASSIVE DEFENSE
Now we are getting to the action! Passive defense measures describe things that you can have in place that operate passively, or systematically, without you needing to do anything. Since we are within the realm of DEFENSE instead of DETERRENCE, the implication here is that the criminal has already cased your property or house and has determined that it is a relatively safe, easy, and lucrative target. This also means that your passive and active deterrence strategies have of course failed.
Please keep one thing in your mind as you continue past this point. If you have put any effort at all into deterrence using any of the aforementioned strategies or some of your own, and you are STILL attacked… that carries with it some implications that are helpful to keep in mind.
Before I mention those implications, let me clarify an important point: I’m not talking about something theoretical here. Put yourself in your own shoes in the dark hours of the night and imagine that three months from now you hear something a lot more alarming than a minor bump in the night.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 37 Imagine that you are waking up to what you believe was the sound of glass breaking, and then you move to your bedroom door and listen as you hear tiny pieces of glass falling on your floor somewhere in your house; you hear the scraping and rattling sound of somebody undoing your locks… in that moment right there, many people would assume that they don’t know much; that they are in the dark.
But that is actually not true: because as I said, certain implications can be known for certain. They all have to do with the fact that EVEN THOUGH you put in place a great number of active and passive deterrence measures, this intruder has disregarded all of them and has STILL commenced with his attack.
That means that you are either dealing with a very dumb criminal – or – an extremely motivated, aggressive, committed, and determined criminal. Either way: dumb or determined, this is a dangerous threat. Somebody who may not understand how much risk they are exposing themselves to, or somebody who doesn’t care, or somebody who believes that they have you outgunned and defeated.
We will talk about what this means for how you should go
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 38 about working to defend yourself, but for now keep this in mind: if you are being attacked, it means the criminal CHOSE to attack IN SPITE of all the impressions you have tried to give through your active and passive deterrence strategies.
In the concealed carry realm, I talk about this same effect as it relates to your physical fitness and strength level as well as your perceived alertness and toughness. If you are hunched over and 80 years old when you are attacked, clearly your attacker is not expecting much resistance. Very little resistance will be needed to stop that attack in general – that is why you hear stories of 90-pound old ladies scaring away muggers by swinging their purses at them.
But if you are 40 years old and well-built and are attacked, then you can immediately conclude and understand as you push to escape or defend yourself that these attackers assessed you and still thought they could win. Therefore, it will take a whole lot more than a few wild flails to break off that attack.
Again, we will discuss more of this in the active defense measures section. For now, just understand that if you put effort into passive deterrence or active deterrence and still find an intruder in your home or trying to gain access to your home, this is an extremely serious threat, and simply announcing your presence or even announcing your armed presence may very well NOT be enough to shut that invasion down.
In fact, by announcing your presence or armed presence you may give up the tiny bit of tactical advantage that you
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 39 still have.
So, there you are in the heat of the moment. A criminal has not only selected your house for targeting, but he is in the active commission of attempting to gain entry. The last line of defense you have before being forced to make personal contact with this intruder are the things in this category that we are calling passive defense measures.
The best and most easily understood example is of course: door locks and window locks.
Door locks are of course a no-brainer. However, not because they keep you any safer! You see, without exception, there is no perfect lock for a house’s doors or windows. All of them can and have been circumvented, and most of them can be bypassed or simply destroyed very, very quickly and easily.
Again, door locks and window locks do not keep you safe – that is not what they are designed to do. Instead, locks have two purposes, and once we understand these two purposes, we can then choose the kinds of locks for our doors and windows that make the most sense.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 40 CHAPTER 8: THE (ONLY) TWO ROLES OF PASSIVE DEFENSE MEASURES
Door and window locks: they alert us.
The most important job a passive defense measure has, such as door and window locks, is to alert you to an attack. If your doors and windows are not locked, the first indication that you have a home invader may very well be the muzzle of a gun touching your sleeping head. Or worse. The best locks therefore are not the ones that are the hardest to pick, but instead the ones that are the noisiest, easiest, and most painstaking to circumvent.
Door and window locks: they buy us time.
The second most important job that passive defense measure, such as door and window locks, has is to buy the critical seconds that you need to ready yourself once you’ve been alerted to the presence of an attack.
When out and about carrying concealed, I focus so heavily on situational awareness because every half-second’s worth of warning that one gets of an imminent attack immeasurably increases one’s odds of being able to not only survive that attack, but to respond effectively and shut it down without sustaining any kind of injury.
It is the same for in-home defense, except for the fact that outside of the most ravaged or war-torn situations, most people do not go armed or sleep armed inside their homes. At best, they tend to have a firearm within six or
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 41 10 feet of themselves, but most of the time their weapons may be as much as a 50 or 60-foot walk (or sprint) away – down the hallway, up some stairs, down another hallway, into a bedroom, through that bedroom, and into a closet.
And once you get to that closet, what do you find? Usually, not a handgun or weapon lying locked and loaded and ready for you. Instead, you might find an unloaded weapon with a magazine stored separately. You may find a gun safe that needs to first be unlocked witha combination code or fingerprint input or key. You may find a biometric storage container. Or you may remember that your weapon is in fact stored somewhere else on this particular day.
The bottom line is, being alerted to the reality of an attack early enough to allow for the mounting of an effective defense is even more important with regard to a home invasion. When we factor in the reality that most home invasions happen during sleeping hours, this critical need becomes even more significant.
How soundly do you sleep? Though I wish it weren’t the case, parenthood and very young children have desensitized me to the point where I can get climbed over and kicked in my sleep without waking up. One always hopes that even while sleeping his or her warrior brains will alert us to any truly abnormal noise or presence, but to count on this level of hope would of course be recklessly absurd.
That is exactly why you will find that any passive defense measure worth its salt will achieve those two designations: ALERTING you to the presence of an active attack and
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 42 buying you TIME to arm or prepare yourself and mount an effective defense.
CHAPTER 9: DOOR AND WINDOW LOCK MUSTS
Therefore, when you look at window or door locks, here’s what you want to consider and focus on:
First, do NOT rely on factory-keyed door locks. I once had to secure my film studio from a former employee who was not in possession of his keys on the day of his termination. This is a heavy and reinforced steel door with two custom deadbolts. The small hardware store I stopped at had only one high-quality deadbolt in stock, and I bought it with the plan of replacing the other one later. I quickly installed the new deadbolt above the first one (which itself was many years old) and a few days later absentmindedly stuck the key to the deadbolt I had NOT replaced into the new deadbolt… I didn’t realize my mistake until I was walking into my studio – meaning: two deadbolt manufacturers of entirely different brand names and manufactured at least eight years apart from each other were keyed to the exact same arrangement.
A professional locksmith later told me that this was probably a 1 in 10,000 chance, but I don’t buy it. It would make a lot more sense to me that, to save money, factories tend only to manufacture deadbolts in a few different key arrangements. And therefore, if you do not re-key your deadbolts, I believe it’s possible that somebody could carry a bundle of keys within the space of just a single pants pocket that would stand a decent chance of being
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 43 able to open a good portion of residential doors in this country.
I’ll tell one more story of this nature from my own experience. In high school, a friend of mine told me that he had found a place to mail-order a set of lock picks and he gave me a rough overview of how they work. I was not a thief, but I was intrigued by the idea and I handed over $7 to him one morning. A couple of weeks later, he handed me a small, leather pouch about the size of a pocketknife. Inside were the flimsiest little tools I had ever seen! I told him: thanks for nothing, these things are a joke! And that afternoon I threw them in my car glovebox and never thought about them again.
Probably six months later, I was doing an important computer installation job after-hours for a small, rural school. The administrator of the school was gone on vacation and had hidden the exterior door key for me to find on the premises. Halfway through the job, I was leaving to grab some lunch when I realized at the exact moment the heavy steel exterior door slammed behind me that I had left the key in the building.
How embarrassing! And how unfortunate; not only would I not be able to finish the job, but the school would not be ready for operations on Monday – and I wouldn’t get paid!
As my mind cycled through all the possibilities for how I might get in this building, I remembered that set of lockpicks. I thought, “What the heck? I have nothing to lose.” I found them in my glove box and returned to the steel door. The lock was intimidating – I’m guessing it
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 44 was a lot more sophisticated than your average residential door lock. The door shut so tight that it didn’t rattle in the lock or on its hinge even the width of a hair.
But remembering what my friend had said about the operation of these picks, I stuck the L-shaped piece of tin into the top of the lock, and picked a random one of the “rakes”– I then put a tiny bit of twisting pressure on the L-shaped piece of tin, push the rake in as far as it would go, and drug it over the pins inside the lock. Nothing happened.
Before I could say “this is hopeless; what a stupid idea,” I released the pressure on the lock, applied the same amount again, stuck the rake in again, and drug it across the pins on its way out of the lock. Can you imagine my surprise as a 17-year-old when on this very second attempt the L-shaped piece of tin suddenly released and gave way in my grip, and the cylinder of the lock rotated a few degrees? “No way,” I thought. And yet, I continued
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 45 twisting the L-shaped piece of tin and rotated the cylinder almost 180°. I felt the lock open up inside the door, and I pulled the door open without any resistance.
My mouth dropped open as I sat there staring at those lockpicks. I had never dreamed it could be so easy to break into a building – in this school, here on a Saturday with nobody around for a mile. A school loaded with laptops, desktop computers, and all the books and art supplies you could imagine. I’ll tell you what: I twisted those picks into a tangle and threw them away into the administrator’s waste basket. I had no desire to be in possession of such a recklessly powerful tool.
You must therefore not only re-key your door locks but spend the extra money to get door locks with enough sophistication that picking them is impossible. The intruder must be required to break the door lock if they are going to get in through that passageway.
The next step once you’ve insured that breaking the lock is the only way to get through it, is just to make the lock very difficult to break. Expert opinions are unanimous on this front: exterior house doors absolutely need to have steel door frames.
It is therefore extremely frustrating that this is in no way, shape, or form the standard practice for exterior door manufacturers. Almost without exception, entry and mid-level exterior doors use wood frames. With a door
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 46 like this, a boot checked with force at the exact point of the door lock and deadbolt can usually send the frame to splinters, and there are plenty of videos online that confirm this fact.
You can hope that such a hard impact on your exterior door would wake you up, but it’s possible that it wouldn’t. Or, it’s possible that the loud and sudden crack would wake you up, but that the kick would be so sharp and fast that the silence which follows might cause you, sitting up in your bed, to wonder if you had imagined or dreamed the whole thing. Far better if your door locks are harder to break than that.
A steel door, or at least a steel door frame can achieve this goal. These take a lot more force, and often repeated blows before they give way.
For window locks, the best the most people can do in a normal “peace time” situation is to make sure that the windows cannot be breached from the outside WITHOUT breaking the glass. If the glass is broken, you stand a chance of being alerted. However, this is not a perfect solution. The reason is because of how easy it is to score and cut glass.
This is yet another experience I benefited from as a kid; I spent a few years working in a hardware store. I cut a lot of glass and fixed a lot of windows in my time there, but I also had the opportunity to experiment with handheld glass cutters.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 47 And what you have seen in the movies absolutely is possible: where a suction cup can be placed onto a piece of glass, where a square or rough circle around the cup can be scored with a scoring tool, and where you can score it again and again while gently jiggling the suction cup until that piece of glass snaps off, still cleanly attached to the suction cup. There’s a chance the plate glass will break and that they will make noise, but there’s also the chance the glass will fall outward onto a shrub or grass and will be silent.
For these reasons, you cannot count on door or window locks to do either of their jobs: not to alert you to the presence of an attacker, nor to buy the time to prepare and mount an effective defense.
Doors and windows are by no means the only points you need to be concerned about; and simply picking locks or breaking them (or breaking them loudly) are not the only ways through them. I could give countless examples of this. If you put on your thinking cap and decide to re- approach your house like a criminal, I believe you’ll be very surprised at what is possible and what you will discover.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 48 Just a few years ago I was helping my father with one of his renovation projects. On two separate occasions, he forgot the exterior door key to get us into this vacant house. And yet, it was a 90-minute drive back to get the key! Absolutely no problem; we were comfortably in the house within 60 seconds both times.
On one occasion, he simply wrenched the garage door open. The electric mechanical garage door opener was no match for one of his arms. He was able to pull the door open 6 inches, which allowed me to belly crawl beneath the door and open it from the inside. We promptly repaired the damage and were alarmed at the ease of our own breaking and entry, so we screwed a 2 x 4 to the top of the garage door frame so that nobody else could repeat our tactic and steal our tools while we worked over the next couple of weeks. But as I mentioned before, just a few days afterward he forgot the key again! Once again… It was no problem.
He said, “have you ever tried the credit card trick to open a door?” I said I hadn’t. He said, “well let me see your credit card.” I told him to use his own! He said he didn’t want to. On the floorboard of his pick-up was a plastic container that a pair of pliers had come in. I used my knife to cut off a rectangle and handed it to him. He said, “let’s see about this.”
He pushed his shoulder into the door which caused a 16th-inch gap to appear between the door and the weather-stripping. He jimmied the piece of plastic into the gap until it had turned the corner necessary to put it along the face of the door. He then dragged the piece of plastic down until it had stopped, contacting the door lock mechanism where it touched the striker plate on the
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 49 door frame. He said “OK…”and started a light sawing motion as he twisted the door handle back-and-forth. Within five seconds, the piece of plastic had compressed the door lock and the door popped open. My words were: “Wow. That’s scary.”
I say again: even though one would like to think that as a guardian they are wise enough to understand that door and window locks do not keep them safe, many of them would at least hope that a degree of either skill, or patience, or strength, or NOISE is required in order to breach these things. But even just from these couple of anecdotes from my own life, you can see that this is most definitely NOT the case. None of that is required. The materials that you have in your pockets right now, or simply the strength of your hands themselves, or your shoes alone could snap, break, press, pick, slice, or stomp your way into – I would imagine – 99.999% of private residences in this country.
If you want to break in within a second or two, surely this would require that you make some noise. But if you have a tiny bit of time and a little bit of patience, I am certain you could get into almost any house silently. And if you are in any kind of good shape and able to climb to the rails of porches or to access the second story windows, or can afford to buy a ladder - I have no doubt that there is no residence that is safe from a silent breach by your hands – or especially those of a seasoned criminal.
That is why when you consider passive defense measures and systems for your home, you must go beyond simple door locks and window locks. Simple door locks and window locks may be enough in “peace time” or times
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 50 of plenty. They may be enough when there are hundreds of homes in your neighborhoods that are unoccupied for long stretches during the day and when the odds of a burglar happening to attack your home are comparatively rare.
But in a situation where the rule of law is losing its potency or where even your neighbors cannot be trusted to consider raiding your pantry... door and window locks are not enough. Let’s therefore consider the other measures that can be taken in terms of passive defense measures to help stop a criminal attack in progress, as they attempt to breach entry into your home.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 51 CHAPTER 10: SUPERCHARGED DOOR AND WINDOW LOCKS
What I’d like for you is to step outside of the realm of traditional door locks, mentally and physically. The door locks we westerners use on our home doors would be considered a joke – and I am not exaggerating – by any people of any other time in human history. Indeed: in most parts of this world, these fancy, expensive locks would quickly be tossed aside.
The locks we use to secure our windows and doors – in almost all examples we can find – are not designed to keep criminals out of your house. Instead, these locks are designed to show other civilized people that “we do not wish for them to enter right at the moment.” They are designed to demonstrate to our insurance companies and police officers that, “See? We tried to ask the burglars not to enter.”
That’s all a modern door lock is. A polite request. “Please don’t enter.” I tell you now: 80lbs of moving force, in the form of a shoe or even bare foot, will cause an instant failure of most door locks in this country. Therefore, an unlocked door with a piece of paper that asks the question in words is just as effective as a modern, western door lock.
If you want to secure a door or window, you must do more than ask nicely. You must use force.
To use force to secure your doors and windows, it is required that we block their path of travel. In other
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 52 words: we must make it physically impossible for them to open; or, to put more accurately: we must ensure that a criminal would have only a slightly better chance to breach our doors than he would to breach our walls.
This may sound like a tall order. But, it’s not. It’s remarkably easy. In fact, countless devices can be purchased from places like Home Depot, Menards, or Amazon to achieve these goals with incredible ease. These devices work by employing simple friction or leverage. Think: stone age technology.
A brace across a door. A wedge beneath the door. A board blocking a door against a solid wall. That’s all it takes. If you add one of these simple mechanisms to behind your door, you can make them nearly impossible to breach; the fact is that the hinges will begin to break before the door will swing open. Simple physics ensures that the harder your adversary pushes, the more firmly the door is held in place.
Here, too, we can think of security as being the sum of all our layers. You can apply a wedge and a brace. Or any number of measures.
I like wedges and braces, or dowels, because they can quickly and effortlessly be taken down and stowed or pulled out and deployed. They don’t bring the class or quality of our house down a bit.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 53 They don’t have to be fancy, either. I challenged myself to the task of securing all my own, personal doors for less than $10. The final total ended up being only $8, for two 2x4 boards, and the installation took only 45 minutes to complete. Be sure to have a look at the photos in this book to see these examples. That said, we can take the idea of physically securing our houses to any extent that we want.
This day and age, we have a lot of excellent options for truly securing a door or window from human entry. Because we must remember: people are not small! They cannot fit through tight spaces. Therefore, it is possible to actually secure your doors and even your windows. I am, of course, now referring to the placement of actual bars over ground floor windows. Almost none of these types of measures are convenient.
They don’t install easily and they don’t look nice. Some of them make escape from your house as difficult as entry – meaning, they may violate fire codes and leave you without an escape route in an emergency. You always have to be the judge and assess your risks, and balance risks based on what is and isn’t most likely.
This is precisely the struggle of balance people face who are seeking to secure their homes. They need to be hardened as much as possible… but nobody wants to live in a hideous or inhospitable environment. And, nobody
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 54 wants to be the laughingstock of their neighborhood – like the one guy with bars over his windows.
For these reasons, I like the balance given by the removable wedges and bars. Because we must remember: the only things these kinds of security measures need to accomplish is to alert us to the presence of a threat and to buy us time to mount a defense. (We’ve already talked about the utility of these kinds of measures for preventing burglaries when we aren’t home). Therefore, even though having actual bars on our windows would be a major step up from simple path-of-travel wedges and braces, full-fledged bars aren’t really necessary except for the most extreme examples of social unrest, the likes of which we’ve hardly ever seen here in the USA.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 55 A wedge, or brace, can easily make it so that your threat has to kick or beat hard enough to alert you, or has to break that window and alert you. These devices can slow a threat down and make them make so much noise that they’re worth their weight in gold.
Bars, of course, most certainly do make burglaries when you aren’t home a much greater challenge to a threat, but my personal recommendation is to employ as many of these simple ‘wedge and brace’ measures within your home as possible while retaining in a storage closet or in your basement the materials on hand necessary for securing at least your ground floor doors and windows in a more hardened way – full fledged window and door bars - hideous though they may be. Having these types of things on hand costs little in advance, and once you have them… you have them.
Where You Sleep: Your Final Barrier of Entry
Keep in mind that though your outer perimeter may be breached, that doesn’t have to mean complete and unfettered access throughout the entirety of your house. At the very least, consider beefing up the security on your bedroom door. Even if somebody should gain silent entry into your home, it’s very possible that by securing your
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 56 bedroom door you will still be given enough notice and warning through which you can mount an effective defense. Sliding a simple door wedge beneath your door before turning in could gain you 3 to 5 seconds of time. That, too, is a priceless sum bought for pennies on the dollar.
CHAPTER 11: ALARM SYSTEMS
With your door and windows relatively secured as best you can under the circumstances, the next passive defense measure that you need to strongly consider is an alarm system.
There are many different kinds of alarm systems and I’m going to give a quick overview of them here. But to step farther back, you can quickly see that alarm systems require electricity. This means they are excellent options for peacetime and can be useful in times of crises where public utilities are not threatened – such as the 2020 Corona Virus Pandemic.
In the event of a natural disaster such as a hurricane,
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 57 or in a more long-term or sustained social or economic disruption, an alarm system that depends on electricity may lose some of its value. Given that you are currently living in the COVID-19 outbreak and given that electrical interruptions are almost guaranteed to not be issues beyond regular springtime weather concerns, alarm systems retain a massive amount of utility for you.
Even through power outages, should you also have a backup power source, your alarm system will – literally – help you sleep more soundly at night.
Professional Alarm Systems
As I mentioned before, there are a lot of different kinds of alarm systems. There are those that are totally manually operated, requiring you to push a button that will automatically notify the police, and they scale up from there to those that automatically detect the presence of intruders and automatically notify police. Others are tied to your smoke alarm system and automatically alert the fire department in the event of a fire.
As you know however, in a home invasion the police are virtually guaranteed to be of no practical value to you. You are on your own for 5, 10, or 15 minutes. Even a three- minute response time will not be enough. Therefore, the kind of alarm system that you want is one that will notify you based on two occurrences:
» First, when somebody opens or passes through any of your doorways or windows – or at very
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 58 least, any of your ground floor doors or windows.
» Second, when somebody is moving across your floor inside your house.
A generation ago, this technology would’ve been unheard of, and it could only be seen in thriller movies related to high profile casino heists, bank jobs, or museum infiltrations. Nowadays, for just about $30~ per month, all of this security can be at your disposal.
In my house, all of our bedrooms are on the upstairs floor. All the basement and ground floor exterior doors are tied to an alarm system through hardwiring. All of the windows on the basement and ground floor levels are tied to the same alarm system through wireless monitors.
If these windows are broken or breached, an alarm will sound throughout the house and in my bedroom. And just as important to me, both the basement level and the ground floor level are covered by two laser origination points each, which sprawl out over the entire floor, both
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 59 converging on the stairways, which are designed to detect and throw the alarm at any motion.
The security value of systems like these is outrageous. Again, we think of the problem of providing home security in layers: For the criminal to be attempting to breach entry, our deterrence layers have already failed. But now we have our lights and physical security devices, and if those fail, we have the alarm system.
Between these two layers, you are given a good chance of achieving your two goals: again, to learn of the presence of an attacker and attack, and to be given the notice and warning to prepare yourself to mount an effective defense.
In fact, I suspect that very quickly you will find that the only disadvantages of systems like this are.... false alarms! It will be your challenge and mission therefore to not let yourself become fatigued with the amount of false alarms you experience so that you can resist the temptation to start turning it off.
In this way, home security will be a whole family mission. Teenagers must be trusted and must be given an access panel in the hallway (outside of your bedroom) and they must be familiar with its operation. They must know to disarm the system if they need to enter in those secure areas at night, and they must understand how to re-arm the system when they head back to bed.
If you ask me, $30~ per month for this kind of security is a bargain.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 60 Homemade Alarm System
That said… what if you can’t afford an alarm system like this? Or what if you don’t want one? Or what if you experience a power outage (short or long term) and your alarm system is no longer helpful? In this case, you still have those two goals – and in fact those two goals are probably more important to you now than they were when your alarm system was working!
Those two goals are of course: that you will be made aware of the presence of an attacker early enough so that you have time to mount an effective defense. That is why I must discuss the concept of homemade alarm systems.
The concept is simple: in order to get to you, a threat must cross the physical space between the entry of your home and the entry of your bedroom or wherever you are sleeping. It is possible to physically arrange things throughout your house so that any disturbance of said things would make noise. The ways to achieve this are almost endless.
Everything is on the table. From fishing line trip wires attached to cans filled with rocks and balanced on shelves, to electronic devices set to sound an alarm when a door is opened. These ideas sound silly and paranoid to the extreme when things are going well and crime is an afterthought, but if you ask any veteran of the Vietnam War, you will quickly discover that even silly sounding
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 61 ideas warrant and demand our deepest respect.
To end this section on alarm systems, we must of course once again mention: dogs. Dogs are in general a phenomenal passive defense measure if the dog is of the right disposition.
Personally, I’ve never owned a dog like this. My dogs have always affectionately fit into that category of “she would help the robbers carry my possessions to their van.” And if that’s your reality as well, then aside from a chance of hope, you simply must rule out your dog as any kind of defense measure whatsoever. But for a great many dog owners out there, they have dogs that are conditioned to at very least bark like crazy when they detect the presence of somebody outside or around their home.
Though this can be a nuisance, it’s advantages in a security situation are extremely evident. Of course, as with any other measure, dogs are always prone to failure. A criminal could invade your home on the one night your dog decides to sleep like a rock. Or your dog may be sleeping next to a loud fan. Or any number of potential scenarios. But if the dog is of a certain disposition, you will find a phenomenal additional layer of passive defense measures.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 62 CHAPTER 12: INTERIOR MOTION LIGHTS
Next, I have to mention the value of interior motion lights, or night lights. Even though these typically dim lights offer little in the way of inducing panic within the mind of a criminal, they offer a lot of utility where actual illumination or investigation are concerned.
Meaning: if you can glance down a hallway and rule out that anybody has been within that space in the last 30 seconds (or for however long the nightlights you use stay illuminated), this information can be a lot of value to you as you look for the source of the noise or actively clear your house with weapon in hand.
Of course, for them to be of any value in that regard, they must be integrated into an outlet box or into the outlet itself (and, they must have power to them). Or, you must be able to actually see that the nightlight is still plugged into the outlet – because if it simply plugs into an outlet, it can easily be removed.
These kinds of interior motion lights for your hallways, stairways, front porch, or other traffic bottlenecks are good ideas when used this way and when
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 63 their strengths and limitations are understood and kept in mind.
CHAPTER 13: HOW TO AVOID INSTANTLY MAKING YOUR PASSIVE DEFENSE MEASURES COMPLETE USELESS TO YOU
There are a few things I want to leave you with before we move into the realm of active defense measures.
Use Your Passive Defense Measures.
The first is the notion that the best door locks, the best alarm system, and the best guard dogs are of zero value to you if you do not USE THEM, and if you do not HEED THEIR WARNINGS.
Make sure you use them. When you go to sleep, consider every window and door a guard post; every window and door lock or security mechanism like your own personal guard. But imagine that they’re lazy guards! They have zero initiative. YOU need to put on your captain’s bars and visit each post before you turn in. “Okay, kitchen window. Let me hear it. All buttoned down? Is your dowel in place?”
Secure your perimeter every night. Think of the man in Connecticut, whose first indication that there was an intruder was a baseball bat to his head. That cannot and
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 64 will not be us, but we must take precautions every night and at each point.
Listen To Your Passive Defense Measures.
Second, do not forget: at the risk of being redundant, I say again: the best thing any of these things can offer you where security is concerned is that they first notify you of the presence of a threat and attack, and second that they buy you time to mount a defense. That means it’s possible that there will be a situation where they do their job, but where you fail to do yours.
Having been exposed to countless home invasion stories and scenarios, I can tell you that in every instance where a homeowner confronted an invader successfully, I heard that homeowner say something akin to: “It’s just crazy. You check out those kinds of noises in the night a hundred or thousand times in your life and you get used to it being nothing, but this time… it was something.”
Every time you hear a noise at night, know that the benefits of checking it out outweigh the costs a million times over. Even if you just checked five minutes ago, check again. Condition yourself to pay attention to and value those warnings. Every time you disregard one, you condition yourself to lower your guard a little bit more each time.
When You Plug One Hole, You Make Another.
Third. Consider this: Every single time you reinforce the weakest point in a defensive perimeter, you instantly
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 65 cause a NEW point to become the new weakest one. In other words: if that back sliding door is nagging at you, but if after an afternoon you fix that troublesome door by replacing its lock and by cutting a dowel to help keep it secure at night, now you’ve got to re-analyze your entire perimeter.
Because, now there’s a new window or door that has suddenly become the weakest, most least-secure one. Always be aware of this, and make sure you are always aware of what you suspect your weakest points are.
Prevent Robberies.
Last of all, let me leave you with this. Remember that while home invasions happen when you’re at home (and that when you’re at home, it’s a home invasion that you should be most concerned about), the moment you leave, a burglary becomes the top concern for your home.
Therefore, every deterrence and passive defense measure you have now has two new roles:
To PREVENT a burglary, and to MITIGATE the damage a burglary causes to you and your family.
Now, you’ve already done everything you can to prevent a robbery if you’ve followed the steps in this guide. However, here’s one reality we must keep in mind:
Even though it’s entirely possible to harden every single window and every single door while you’re in your home,
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 66 such that it takes a criminal a lot of time, noise, and force to get in… (plenty for to respond to). When you’re not there, there’s nobody to hear these sounds – except perhaps your neighbors, but in modern America, this kind of neighborly vigilance is rare.
So the best thing you can do to prevent a robbery, usually, is to ‘funnel’ the criminals to the most visible side of the house. To do this, you want to focus as much of your hardening measures on the blind or obscure areas of your house as you can, and make sure those are secure from the inside.
You want to be sure to exit your house out its strongest door, because you can’t wedge or jam the door that you walk out of. If you have one steel-frame door in your house, that’s the one you want to exit out of and lock from the outside.
Mitigate Robberies
But as you know by now: the reality is that if someone is truly committed to getting inside your home, and if they have the time and privacy to work at it, they’re going to get in. Even with the best remote-reporting security system, a burglar can easily sweep a house for the most valuable objects and leave long before police can arrive.
Therefore, we must also focus on mitigating robberies by protecting our most valuable assets.
Many of us would like to think that we can outsmart a criminal – I’m guilty of having tried this myself. But
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 67 reading dozens of interviews with former burglars has sobered me of these errant ideas.
In one criminal’s words: “In cereal boxes beneath the bags, in trash cans, under mattresses, stuffed into socks… I know where to find the stuff people want to hide the most.”
The best shot we’ve got as home owners is a safe. A high quality safe that is bolted, from within, directly into the house frame. It is almost impossible to hide things well enough inside our homes such that a criminal or criminal team won’t be able to find them if given 10, 30, or 90 minutes to look. But a high quality mounted safe can take a lot longer than that to break into or cut from the floor.
Statistically, safes are our best bets for protecting our valuable documents, money, metals, guns, or jewelry.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 68 LAYER 4: ACTIVE DEFENSE MEASURES
CHAPTER 14: AN INTRODUCTION TO ACTIVE DEFENSE MEASURES
Let’s take a step back to look at the chronology of exactly what we’re discussing here. To reach this point of active defense, you know that your passive deterrence strategies have failed resulting in a criminal actually selecting your home as the target of a burglary or invasion.
We also know that your active deterrence strategies have failed, resulting in a burglar who, on his approach to your house through your property, was not discouraged from continuing in that approach to a door or window or other entry point into your home.
We also know that your passive defense measures have also failed to stop the threat, meaning a threat has actually managed to gain entry into your home.
What is uncertain at this point is whether those passive defense measures have succeeded in either of the two critical roles: to alert you to the presence of an attack, or to slow that threat down enough to give you those precious seconds to arm and equip yourself to mount an effective defense.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 69 For the sake of our discussion here, we simply must assume that at least one layer of your passive defense measures has succeeded in alerting you to the presence of an intruder or a criminal who is attempting to gain access to your home.
The reason is because, if it didn’t, one of two scenarios will take place:
Either the intruder is a “peaceful” burglar and your first indication that you were robbed will be in the morning when you move through your house and take stock of the situation…
Or, the intruder will have been a violent one and, because you were not warned in any way, your first indication will be being caught off guard (if during the day) or caught off guard in your sleep (if during the night). In other words, you will have been caught in a compromised position – almost certainly while unarmed – by a threat.
At this point, you are essentially at his mercy. Effective self-defense is still plenty possible, but now we move into a scenario very similar to the multitude of those that we study in some of our other curricula here at Concealed Carry University, namely those found within the third volume of our “3 SECONDS FROM NOW” series, “Winning the 1-second Advantage.”
To get and be prepared to leverage all of the tactical principles of dealing with this kind of situation where you are caught in a compromised position (such as tactical compliance, escape, violence mitigation, de-escalation,
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 70 diversion and distraction, creating windows, or identifying windows in real time through which you can get to a weapon or escape), I would encourage you to obtain and move through that program. That in itself is a four-hour educational training program, and it contains far too much to delve into here.
The entire point of all of the home defense measures that you have taken up to now is to avoid exactly that situation. Once again, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I want to stress those two critical points:
Absolutely every measure must be taken by you to ensure that you will be alerted to the presence of a potentially violent threat inside or around your home BEFORE he can find you or put you in a compromised position. Every word of this guide up to this point has been focused on either that goal, or the goal of avoiding having your home targeted in the first place.
Absolutely, anything you can do to ensure that you are
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 71 alerted to their presence as early as possible must be done. If you have any ambiguity about things you can do, revisit the previous chapter on passive defense measures.
CHAPTER 15: ALERT TIME: HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?
We keep emphasizing that point, that you not only need to be alerted to the presence of the threat, but that you need advanced notice. So how much advanced notice are we talking about?
Obviously, the answer is: the more notice the better. If you knew that your home would be invaded at exactly 2:51AM next Wednesday, that criminal would be in for a horrible surprise.
Realistically, no matter how effective your passive defense measures are, we will only ever be talking about seconds, and what will always be true in any home invasion situation is that every additional second’s worth of advance notice that you can get with regard to an imminent threat, the more your odds of survival and victory will go through the roof.
How many seconds you need is completely dependent on you and your own personal situation.
For example, the bachelor who has no life outside of being prepared for a violent attack may sleep with a loaded pistol and shotgun or rifle next to his bed; his bedroom may be on the upper floor of his home; all his valuables
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 72 may be in his bedroom with him; and he may therefore only require two or three seconds of advance notice in order to mount an effective defense.
However, if you are like most people, your situation is very different from this and what it means to launch an “effective defense” will probably differ for you very greatly from this hypothetical bachelor.
For me personally, my personal survival through a home invasion situation is nowhere near as important to me as protecting the lives of my children and wife. And, even more important than my own survival: protecting my children from experiencing victimization.
Even outside of protecting others, there are plenty of situations that we can imagine where simply surviving would not constitute an EFFECTIVE defense. For just one example, we can consider a long, drawn out scenario of food shortages in the country. If food truly was so scarce as to place your own store of provisions as the difference between life and death, then clearly protecting those provisions must be accomplished in order to count your defense as effective or not.
And so here you see how your personal needs dictate exactly how much advance notice you need to have with the presence of a threat in or around your house.
What I mean is, it is not enough for me to only learn of the presence of a threat outside my bedroom door - even if my door is secure enough to allow me to arm myself before the threat breaches that door. The reason, of
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 73 course, is because his presence outside my door would automatically imply that he has had unfettered access to my children’s rooms for any amount of time up to that point.
That said, I am fortunate: all of my children sleep on the upstairs level that my wife and I sleep on, and my bedroom is the closest to the stairway – the only point of access to the upstairs floor other than the second-story windows. Meaning, that - if simple survival is my only goal, as it is during a peacetime when food and possessions can be replaced - I only need enough advanced warning to allow me to arm myself and position myself at a tactical advantage at the top of my stairway.
If one of my children were sleeping downstairs, then I would need enough advance notice to arm myself, move downstairs, and put myself in a position where I could either guard all entrances before the threat has breached them, or collect the children sleeping downstairs and move them upstairs to where a better (or easier/more efficient) defense can be mounted.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 74 To go even further, if by “effective defense” I meant that I had to keep my family safe AND guard certain provisions, I would need enough notice to accomplish all of that.
That means that what you have to do is reverse engineer what you need to be able to accomplish and compare that to how long it will take you to accomplish it. When you do that and add some time for a buffer to allow for any number of unforeseen factors, then you have the number for how much advance notice you need in order to be able to mount an effective defense.
For example, I might need three seconds to snap out of a groggy state, two seconds to jump out of bed and race to my closet, two seconds to retrieve my firearm, and three seconds to sprint to the top of the stairway to my preferred bottleneck and ambush point as I listen and await further evidence or information.
To continue using this as an example, that would mean I need 10 seconds of notice. The next question is: how long does it take to get from various points inside your home to that very last stuff you want them to be able to take before you can meet them with force?
From my front door, somebody who knows exactly where to go could sprint to that point in only 3.5 seconds. Fortunately, there is no guarantee that the intruder will be able to make a beeline directly to this final stopping point, but still:
This shows that I either need to be able to go from a sleeping state to my defensive choke point much more
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 75 quickly, or I need to get more time for myself.
If somebody breaks a window, I need to find out the moment that glass shatters. It will take them two or three seconds to clear the threshold, and another three seconds to get to my defensive choke point, or “red line.” This is better, but it still shows that additional security measures to slow people down at those points of entry are required.
In addition to pushing myself to be able to move to that point of preferred defense faster (including having a more accessible but still childproof firearm), I also need to be working on ways to delay criminals from making entry into my home.
CHAPTER 16: THE MOST DANGEROUS COMMON DENOMINATOR
Those kinds of exercises are excellent practice, and you will always benefit from speed and efficiency in those situations. That said, the reality of the situation is that criminals rarely want a confrontation with you.
Because of this and other factors associated with the motivations and desires of the criminal intruder (such as their own need to be quiet, their own disorientation and uncertainty inside your home, the potential that they are in a chemically altered state, and the likelihood that they are hoping to collect valuables and escape before you become aware of them), you will likely find that a home burglary or home invasion scenario looks a lot less in most cases like this sort of “seven second mad dash and confrontation”...
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 76 ... and a lot more like a 30 or 40 second scenario where you move as quickly as you can into a state of readiness and uncertainty, and then try to inform that uncertainty by collecting information with your senses from a safe point, and ultimately to making one of the several tactical decisions in that moment that you will want to make – all of which we will discuss soon.
This is all to say that with regards to a home invasion or burglary, the type of actual threatening situation we may face could vary across a very wide spectrum. From that 10 second mad dash toward confrontation, to a protracted five-minute clearing of your house as a perpetrator desperately seeks to avoid you and escape out a different exit point before you can confront him, and anything and everything in between.
All this means is that, just like within the realm of concealed carry, you must prepare for the most dangerous “common denominator.” That is, you must ready yourself for the most intense scenario that you realistically stand a chance of facing, and once you do, you will be able to rest confidently in the knowledge that you have prepared
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 77 yourself for every lesser inevitability.
CHAPTER 17: THE IMPORTANCE OF RESPONDING TO OUR INTUITION
The majority of situations that you stand a chance of encountering as a peaceful private citizen will begin innocuously. You will hear a noise that will beckon you to investigate it, as you undoubtably have dozens of times before.
I’ve already mentioned how important it is to investigate these things every time they happen. You want to build those good habits, and you want to use every opportunity you can to practice handling them. You want to train your senses themselves to be vigilant, and you want to reward them for alerting you.
CHAPTER 18: A LIGHTNING-FAST RESPONSE
When you hear a noise, you must begin taking action immediately. Do not lay in bed listening for confirmation that the noise is worth getting up. The best response is the one that puts you in a position of at least tactical comparability to a potential intruder, but ideally one of a tactical advantage.
This means you need to spring out of bed and arm yourself with the appropriate tools as quickly as possible. Explain
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 78 this necessity to your spouse so that they know that it is the only rational course of action – there is no overreaction with regard to safety. “Better safe than sorry.”
CHAPTER 19: GEARING UP: THE TOOLS YOU WILL NEED
So, what do you arm yourself with? And what do you take?
This is largely going to depend on what you have and what you are most comfortable with. If this were England, you might have a baseball bat. Fortunately, it’s not England.
The first decision point is: a long gun or handgun?
Again, it depends on what you are most comfortable with. Each weapon system has its own advantages and disadvantages.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 79 Personally, I believe a handgun with a high-capacity magazine and a rail mounted flashlight plus a flashlight in your offhand is the most versatile combination for clearing a house.
That said, choosing a handgun over a long gun could put you in a serious disadvantageous position compared to an adversary. Not only that but carrying a flashlight in your offhand destabilizes your shooting platform.
This is why I keep two weapon systems in my master bedroom for either situation.
For a situation where my wife or I heard a noise but have zero other data or reason to believe there is an issue, I quickly grab the set up you see above, with the Glock 17 and 33-round magazine and rail mounted light and loose flashlight to hold in my offhand.
However, I also have a short M4 carbine with a rail mounted flashlight and 30-round magazine with indoor auxiliary sites that I keep handy for a situation where
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 80 I am positive or even reasonably sure that there is an intruder in the house.
I could not begin to count or even estimate the number of times I have had to move throughout my house with this pistol and flashlight. But only once have I moved throughout the house with the M4, and it was when, indeed, there was an unknown person banging on my front door at 3AM.
In the end, he was a dangerously intoxicated young man who was looking for his uncle’s house which, the police later determined, was over 250 miles away in the city of Detroit.
But this goes to emphasize the point that it’s OK to have different weapon systems for different purposes. You just need to have settled in your mind ahead of time what those purposes are and when you will grab one or the other.
The reason I keep the long gun for situations where I believe a confrontation is more likely than with the handgun is because, even within my home with its open floor plan, there is the possibility for needing to take shots
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 81 farther than I am comfortable shooting with a handgun – especially using only one hand. Granted, I keep the flashlight mounted on the Glock so that I could drop the flashlight from my offhand to obtain a better shooting stance. But still, the devastating fire power and accuracy of the rifle and the sheer psychological comfort of moving toward an unknown with such a magnificent weapon is worth a great deal to me.
CHAPTER 20: ONE-HANDED SHOOTING PRACTICE & PRACTICING IN THE DARK
Make sure you’ve gotten plenty of dry and live-fire practice with shooting with one hand! Remember that within 3 SECONDS FROM NOW: THE ULTIMATE TEST we uncovered that real-world fact that by far most of the shooting you’ll do in a self-defense situation will involve shooting with only a one-handed grip. That means, if your home defense weapon is a handgun, you want to be good out to 7 yards with one hand.
While it’s hard to achieve, try to get in some night time low-light and no-light shooting practice at least once in your life (and sooner, rather than later). You want to know what to expect, and you don’t want to learn for the first time how bright and disorienting your muzzle flashes can be in the thick of the moment.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 82 CHAPTER 21: LONG GUNS: SHOTGUNS OR RIFLES?
Once again, this depends on what you are comfortable with. There is no right and there is no wrong answer. I can visualize several hypotheticals where I would rather have my semi-automatic 12-gauge shotgun. But I have obviously determined that for me and in my own life, a rifle makes the most sense.
There have been elaborate discussions throughout history about the penetration capabilities of pistol rounds versus rifle rounds versus shotgun buckshot versus shotgun bird shot. And there is a great deal that can be said in a confined situation or one where neighbors’ houses are very close, where the most prudent and potentially effective solution is a pump or semi-automatic shotgun loaded with number six bird shot, or number four buckshot.
To settle these questions is up to each individual user, and to think that there is a universal solution that is “the best” or that “only a fool would do anything” disregards one of the most important elements of any tactical plan, which is the reality that the person within the tactical situation has the best view and perspective of the exact needs of that scenario.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 83 While nothing is guaranteed, I was able to design my home in such a way that it is extremely unlikely that I would ever need to take a shot toward my children’s bedrooms. Furthermore, the nearest neighbor to my house is over 450 yards away and the factors to my reasoning that demand more precision and accuracy outweigh for me the risks of over-penetration from a rifle round, or the advantage of spreading buckshot.
Additionally, the high-capacity magazine of the rifle is more appealing to me for those kinds of situations than the typical low tube capacity of the average defensive shotgun.
You can see that while my situation is exceptional, your situation will have its own exceptions as well. Again, everybody has to make this decision on which weapon to use for themselves.
Just do me one favor: you will most likely not keep a round chambered in your home defense weapon. Make sure you do not forget to chamber it when you pick it up and move to investigate a noise (Note: you will want to chamber that round SILENTLY…).
CHAPTER 22: ALARM SCENARIOS vs DANGER SCENARIOS
At this point in this training manual, we’re going to diverge down two different paths. One will be the assumption that during those seconds that it took you to spring from
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 84 your bed and arm yourself, you have heard nothing new. No more noises. No more indication that there was or is a threat. We will call this path, the “alarm” path. And since this is by far the most likely scenario for you to end up in (many times over the coming years), we will discuss this path first.
The second one we will discuss is the “danger” path. This is when, in the time it takes you to get to your firearm, you receive other data through your awareness or senses - or those senses of somebody else in your house - that there is indeed reason to be alarmed.
It could be another bump. It could be glass breaking. It could be a scream from a child. It could be your own bedroom door being kicked open on your way to your firearm - however it looks, if you receive more indication that there is reason to be concerned that a threat is around or in your home in those first few seconds, your actions will be different than in a situation where there has NOT been any indication that there is further cause for alarm.
Clearly, in either scenario you must take action. Because even a “routine” “bump in the night” could very well turn out to be the only indication you will get that there is a violent threat in your house until you face him. But your actions will certainly differ based on those two scenarios; that is why we will discuss them separately.
CHAPTER 23: CLEARING YOUR HOUSE vs. STAYING PUT
You hear a bump in the night. You spring out of bed and arm yourself. In the time it’s taking you to do so
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 85 you have been tuned in and you haven’t heard or felt or sensed anything else. Perhaps you whisper to your spouse while arming yourself, “Did you hear it? Have you heard anything else?”
What you do from here depends on what you NEED to do. For example, if you have children sleeping downstairs, you need to get nearer to their bedrooms. If you don’t have to check on any children, you are in a better position, tactically speaking.
The absolute ideal case in any home defense situation is that you will stay put in your bedroom, or in an area where you are protected from any kind of threat except through one single entry point, or bottleneck, or choke point – such as your bedroom door. If you are on the ground floor and have a large window, this is another entry point.
If that ground floor window is pitch black and you do not have shades or blinds, then you are in a compromised position. Hopefully exploring these potential situations
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 86 ahead of time will allow you to spot areas of vulnerability like this and patch them in advance.
For example, in this case, you will say: “I need to make sure to have a blind over this window and to close it every night when I sleep. Otherwise, an intruder outside could simply shine in a flashlight and see me.” The bottom line is that the tactical ideal is that you will be able to stay put where are you are. “Let them come to you,” as the timeless maxim tells us.
The reason for this is because it puts you in the greatest position of tactical advantage. If you are alerted to the presence or activity of an intruder, and you silently slide off your bed, silently arm yourself, and hold up your flashlight while leaving it switched off at your closed bedroom door, and if that bedroom door is the only way a threat can get to you, then you are in a brilliant position.
First of all, your threat most likely will not know that your bedroom is your bedroom. They will have to suspect it as they open and close each door, and they will have to be ready. By the laws of action and reaction, they will most likely not be able to catch up with you in terms of winning the initiative in that moment. In other words: they will crack the door open, and if they are backlit and you get visual confirmation that they are indeed a violent and potentially lethal threat, you can fire at them from the dark room so that their first indication that there is anybody else in the house whatsoever is themselves being shot. There’s almost no threat on earth who will do anything in the situation other than immediately turn and bolt and flee as fast as possible (if they are not terminally wounded by your defensive gunfire).
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 87 If they crack the door and are not backlit, you can light them up with your flashlight to get visual recognition of this person. You know your life and your household and the general idea of what goes on in it. Clearly you want to do everything in your power to avoid ever harming or killing a loved one.
We will talk more about this later, but you will have a decent idea of how likely it is that the person opening your bedroom door is somebody you know and love and trust, versus an unknown threat with malicious intent. In any case, getting that visual recognition is critical, even if it does cost you half of a second as you light them up with your flashlight.
You still retain the tactical advantage, especially since your flashlight has some blinding and disorienting potential (keeping in mind that flashlights are tactically known as “bullet magnets” because when we are seen with them, they are often the only target we present. So, you always want to make sure to light up dark areas like this while holding the flashlight away from your body and off to the side).
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 88 These caveats aside, staying put and hunkering in a defensive position in the event of a threat is by a long shot the most tactically sound and prudent and safe thing for you to do for your own personal safety. This should be done whether you believe there is a very low chance or a very high chance that there is a violent threat in your house.
CHAPTER 24: THE DANGERS OF MOVING AROUND WITHIN YOUR HOME
Movement is dangerous. As soon as you start to move around the inside of your house, you put yourself much closer to a level playing field with your threat. The only advantages you have in this situation where you are moving around your house are that YOU suspect an intruder and expect them to be armed (whereas they are presumably expecting to catch you off guard) and that you know your own house and floor plan better than they do. These are good advantages to have, but they are nowhere near as good as the advantage of staying put in an easily defendable position and letting the threat come to you.
If this is a “peacetime” situation where you don’t even care if you are being robbed blind so long as the threats don’t try to make contact with you… and if it is only you or only you and those in your bedroom who you are concerned about protecting… then staying put is what you should do.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 89 CHAPTER 25: WHY WE CAN RARELY AFFORD TO ‘STAY PUT’ DURING AN ‘ALARM SCENARIO.’
The frustrating reality is that at some point… perhaps sooner than later… you may be forced to move throughout your house.
There are many reasons for this.
The first is because you have other people in your house whose safety is more important to you than your own safety - your children, or grandchildren, or elderly parents, or anybody else. The second reason could be because you have things in your house that you feel compelled to protect even at risk to your physical safety.
This could be your well-stocked pantry in the event of a long-term economic crisis that has put food into the category of a rare commodity and has made starvation for you and your loved ones a very real threat. In this case, it makes no sense to stay holed up in your bedroom while
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 90 you let a team of robbers empty your house of this life- giving sustenance.
Finally, and most realistically, you will have to move throughout your house for one simple reason: because you don’t hear any other indication that there is a threat, and it begins to dawn on you that the noise was probably nothing to be concerned about, and that you really need to be getting back to sleep, but that only a fool would go back to sleep when there MIGHT be somebody in your house!
One option you do have in that situation to ensure that you are exposing yourself to the least amount of risk possible is to call the police. They can come, they can kick your door in, and they can clear the house for you up to the point of your bedroom. They may be willing to do this once or twice before they haul you off to the loony bin!
There absolutely is a time to leverage the police as a phenomenal and life-saving asset in exactly this way, but you need a little more data or suspicion (or confirmation) than a simple bump in the night, of course – and this goes without saying. So, the simple practical reality will guarantee that, at some point, you’re going to have to move through your house with a weapon in hand at a time when you suspect (even with only a one in a million chance) that there might be an intruder who you meet along the way.
You can see how this scenario, the “alarm scenario” differs from the “danger scenario,” in which you hear other things or see other things or get other senses that tell you that – essentially – “if there is not an intruder
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 91 in my house right now or trying to get in… then I don’t know what the heck is going on.”
In the “danger scenario” you are preparing for imminent contact with a potentially violent threat. In the “alarm scenario,” you only suspect that there might be somebody in your house, and you are fully aware that even given what you DID hear, what you DIDN’T hear or HAVEN’T heard SINCE means that most likely, there is no threat. But you still have to check, so: you get up and get yourself to your initial reactive defensive point.
CHAPTER 26: THE “INITIAL REACTIVE DEFENSIVE POINT”
I would like to inject into your mind right now the reality of an “initial reactive defensive point.” This is the first place that you will move to after you arm yourself, regardless of what caused you to either be alarmed or to feel in danger. As we just discussed, this initial reactive defensive point will depend exclusively on what your goals are in terms of home defense.
If it’s just you and your spouse and you don’t care whether you are robbed (and assuming your bedroom is a tactically sound place to hole up) then your initial reactive defensive point may very well be on the side of your bed opposite your bedroom door, with your gun and flashlight pointing at the door itself. But again, if you have dependents in the house, your initial reactive defensive point may be at the top of your stairway. Or downstairs looking around the corner near their bedrooms. And on and on and on.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 92 So, you can drill, and you can practice, and you can visualize, and you can hypothetical your way into being efficient in moving from your bed – to arming yourself – to getting to your initial reactive defensive point.
CHAPTER 27: MOVING TO YOUR “INITIAL REACTIVE DEFENSIVE POINT”
Even if it’s only from your closet back to your bedside, how you conduct this movement must depend upon the tactical reality of the situation. For example, if you suspect that somebody may already be to the point of being outside your bedroom door, then you need to move from your closet back to your bedside with your readied firearm in hand, pointing at your door as you move.
Your challenge will increase the further from you that your initial reactive defensive point is. What you need to be most concerned about is the very real possibility of encountering a violent threat on your way to your initial reactive defensive point.
For example, if that point is at the bottom of your stairway, you need to move carefully and in a way that will make self- defense possible as you go from where you keep your firearm, through your bedroom, across your landing, and down the
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 93 stairway. Run through these hypotheticals in your mind and imagine encountering a threat at any point along that journey.
We will discuss exactly HOW to move tactically in just a little bit. For now, you simply need to be aware that just because you want to reach that initial reactive defensive point as quickly as possible, doesn’t mean you can disregard sound tactics and safe practices as you move there.
CHAPTER 28: A NOTE ON DAYTIME BURGLARIES OR DAYTIME HOME INVASIONS
So far in this guide, we have made the assumption in most situations that the home invasion took place in the nighttime hours, and that you were sleeping when it initially happened.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 94 While this is a likely situation for a home invasion, it is actually statistically more likely that a regular burglary will take place during the day, usually between the hours of 2PM and 4PM. Typically, only burglaries happen under these circumstances and during these times of day – not home invasions.
The difference being: a burglary is when your home is robbed when you were not there or when you were unaware… whereas a home invasion is the forceful entry of your home when the criminal threat understands that you are indeed home at that moment.
Even in the event of a daytime burglary, there’s always the chance that you will catch a burglar by surprise, and he will become violent in his escape attempt or in his attempt to silence you. But you must also understand that there is a real possibility of a violent home invasion taking place during the day involving a threat who knows you are home and who is determined to do you harm.
Even though this guide will tend to continue to assume a nighttime and sleeping scenario, all the same rules apply as you live and move and function throughout your day. Meaning: you need to have practical and quick access to a firearm all throughout the day and in all parts of your house.
Now… It’s important to note here that I am not in any way suggesting that you hide guns all throughout your house. Some people do this, and other people think this is outrageous and grounds for mental evaluation. It’s
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 95 very possible that this is totally unsafe if you have young children in the house. I would never suggest that you do something unsafe.
Clearly, if any of your defensive firearms are ever used intentionally or accidentally to hurt somebody in your own family, then you have completely violated common sense. It would’ve been better for you to have never owned a weapon in your entire life than to let this happen even once.
But, the tactical demands of the ‘problem’ of home defense simply are clear in their requirement that… IF you stand a chance of facing a violent threat all throughout the day… and IF you want to have a reasonable chance of defending yourself from that threat… THEN you need to have reliable and quick access to a defensive firearm.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 96 The perceived environmental or social danger of the times you live in may dictate this somewhat. Meaning: if there is a national or regional situation that has caused an increase in crime and robberies, it might make sense to get a comfortable open carry holster and wear your gun during your waking hours. But during regular “peace time,” most will prefer to stay more comfortable when inside their homes, and instead rely on strategically- placed home defense weapon(s).
Here’s what you want to avoid: in just one of the dozens of situations I can draw from, a man and his wife and their female friend and neighbor were sitting at the kitchen table on a beautiful, sunny morning in Florida, 10 or 15 years ago. Suddenly, two masked men appeared on their back porch, 3 feet away from them, only a glass sliding door between them.
One of the masked men jarred the sliding door open and they force their way in. Long story short, these three victims were told to lie down on the floor at gunpoint. Within 30 minutes they had all been beaten and executed.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 97 But here’s the kicker: the homeowner was a vigilant armed citizen.... but his handgun was 25 feet away in his bedroom nightstand. It might as well have been a hundred miles away.
CHAPTER 29: HOME DEFENSE WEAPONS DURING THE DAYTIME
As much as you may want to avoid disrupting your life, turning your home into what can feel like a war zone or being forced to think about home defense and violent crime every minute of the day… there’s only one way to avoid ending up like that unfortunate man in Florida.
That is, of course, to have a firearm (or at the very least some other means of personal protection) nearby at the moment that you realize a threat is determined to get into your house or onto your property, or that moment when you realize a threat is already there.
Again, one option is to simply carry concealed in your home during the day. Or, since concealed carry tends to involve carry positions that are uncomfortable when you have to sit for extended periods of time, you may consider the purchase of a more comfortable open carry holster. More realistically, the best options that you are left with involve the strategic positioning of your home defense firearms within your home (safe storage from all unwanted or accidental individuals such as children goes without saying).
This can look a few different ways. One option is the
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 98 permanent placement of defensive firearms at a couple of different strategic points inside your home. Another option is to, upon leaving your bedroom for the morning/ day, to move your home defense firearm to a strategic point that will be more accessible to you throughout the day than where you keep it when you sleep.
To determine exactly WHERE to place your firearm (or firearms) strategically in your home, you need only to consider your daily activities and where within your home you spend most of your time. Ask yourself: where might I be sitting or standing or working at the moment I realize a threat is trying to or has already gained access to my home?
This can become an important physical exercise: actually going to each extreme corner of your home. What if I am in the laundry room doing laundry? What if I’m lying on the couch in my living room? What if I’m sitting at the dining room table? What if I’m doing dishes or looking in the refrigerator? What if I am at the front door because I
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 99 was about to open it for what I believed was a government official?
From each of these points, first imagine that you have five seconds of warning to get to a firearm. What options do you have within that radius to safely and accessibly store one? Now, imagine you only have three seconds’ notice. What options exist then? Hopefully, when you plot out these various scenarios you will realize that you don’t need 10 different handguns stored all around your house, in false books and clocks and in false drawers or in other clever locations like that. Hopefully, what you will determine is that the living quarters of your home can be excellently covered by the strategic placement of just one or two home defense weapons.
For example, you might determine you need a handgun in the laundry room and above your refrigerator. Or, you might conclude that you need a handgun in your liquor cabinet and above your mantle. Or, that you need one in your garage and in your downstairs guest bathroom. “I could reach either one of those from almost any corner of my house within three seconds in the event of an emergency.” That is your goal.
CHAPTER 30: HOW TO SAFELY STORE A HANDGUN THROUGHOUT YOUR HOME
Keeping firearms in your home for personal protection is not an easy thing to do. Take it from me, a father of four young children: it is not by any means an easy challenge and you should, at every moment, be painfully aware that even one mess up over the course of your entire life
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 100 could bring with it the most devastating and disastrous consequences for you and your loved ones.
The duty and responsibility you have is that your safety record for storing firearms inside your home must be many magnitudes better than the world’s greatest airline pilots: because you will inevitably have personal protection firearms in your home for several hundred thousand hours during your life – PER firearm. So, by the time you become an old man, you will have been responsible for the safekeeping of a firearm for well over one or even two million “firearm hours.”
It is not an easy task. Especially when these firearms are to be kept for home defense, you are forced to balance safety with practical and fast accessibility. Because anybody can safely store a firearm, regardless of how many kids are in the home: you would simply lock the ammunition in one combination safe for which you are the only person to know the combination, and then disassemble the firearm into several pieces, and store the pieces in separate safes. Boom: instant 2-million-hour perfect safety record.
But following the best practices for the safe storage of a handgun does you no good from a personal protection standpoint. In the event of a home invasion, even having a trigger lock on your weapon could cause that firearm to be of no use to you whatsoever. This is what is meant by: “you are always balancing safety and accessibility.” The fact is: firearms are dangerous, and more dangerous still when in or near anything resembling a state of readiness when stored anyone other than on your person.
I wish I could tell you that the brilliant home defense
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 101 pioneers and engineers who have come before you have come up with the best solutions to these problems. I wish I could tell you there was a special safe or storage device or method that guaranteed that no child or stranger or burglar would ever find your stashed home defense weapon, and one that wouldn’t slow you down in grabbing and deploying that weapon by even a half of a second.
Unfortunately, I do not have any good news for you in this regard. In fact, storing weapons in a way that keeps them accessible but safe is one of the biggest trials associated with effective home defense.
So, your challenge is: you need your firearm to be accessible to you quickly and easily, and as close to a state of locked and loaded readiness as possible. You need your firearm to be hidden from burglars who toss your residence while you are gone – because you do not want your firearm to be used to hurt other innocent people in later crimes.
You need your firearm to be hidden from burglars or home invaders for another important reason: because you don’t want your own weapons to be used against you a few seconds after they find it. You also need your firearms hidden so that guests remain comfortable and do not feel that they are in a war zone or that you are paranoid when they visit your home. Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all: you need your firearms hidden in a way that ensures that young children will not find them by accident.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 102 If you do not have young children in your house, or if young children do not visit your house, your challenge will be immensely easier. If you do, your challenge is the difficult one. Now: In one of the companion checklists that accompany this guide, I would like to offer a list of some of the more ingenious and creative methods for storing home defense firearms in and around your house. Some of them will be better than others, and some of them will simply not be options for your life.
Each one of them represents a different balance struck on that scale of accessibility versus concealment and security and safety. Some of them are blatantly accessible. Others are frustratingly secure. This difficult job can only be done by you and, inevitably, each location where you must store a firearm will require a different balance between accessibility and security.
Before you look at that list, I want to give one final and important note and reminder about this challenge. The problems and needs for effective home defense are real indeed. The safe defense of your home cannot only be your personal responsibility. It is a whole family affair.
So, provided your children are old enough, and even though you should always seek to have your firearms stored in as safe and secure a manner as possible (in the event that other children visit, etc.) it may very well be that the greatest investment that you ever make in terms of firearm storage security in your home is to impart into your children a very healthy respect and solid understanding for firearms and firearms safety.
There are many excellent programs out there to help guide you in talking to your children about both the
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 103 reality of criminals and firearms themselves – programs such as the NRA’s Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program. As you consider how you can store firearms within your home to be of use to you in the event of an attack or invasion, remember that firearm security and safety begins long before deciding what mechanism or device are safe to keep your firearm in. The job itself may begin and end as simply as within the minds of each member of your family.
CHAPTER 31: FINAL NOTES ON DAYLIGHT HOUR HOME INVASIONS
Before we return to your nighttime hypothetical scenario, there are a few important notes to offer regarding daytime attacks.
First, once an attack is on, all the tactics that you’ll explore throughout this guide for nighttime home clearing and home defense will apply completely to daytime situations or attacks. We are case studying a nighttime attack because it represents the more difficult tactical scenario. In short: if I can make you fully prepared to become alerted to and effectively respond to a nighttime home invasion, then I am going to leave you here confident in your ability to respond to and repel a daytime attack.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 104 Second, remember to please keep in mind that even though most home invasions take place in the nighttime hours, most simple robbery or burglary attempts tend to take place during the day. Keep in mind that while most home invaders anticipate a violent confrontation with you, most burglars do not. They don’t anticipate one, and they don’t want one.
In fact, if at any time your presence alone is enough to thwart a home invader during the day, it’s likely that this confrontation was accidental – meaning, the individual most likely did not expect you to be home at that time.
For situations like these, remember that crucial principle that we always go back to where concealed carry is concerned: that in order to effectively defend yourself from a “resource predator” (somebody who is only looking for valuables or money), you typically only need to expose them to a little bit of risk (of getting hurt or of getting caught) in order to force them to disengage and run away. This will usually be the case with home burglars. This will usually NOT be the case with home invaders who are much more determined – but we will discuss those shortly.
For robbers and burglars, your sudden presence, armed or not, will hopefully be enough to cause them to flee, but the key point is that you do not stand between them and their exit when they do flee. You may not be able to control this, but if you can, you always want to give your attacker an escape route. This applies to concealed carry combat as much as it applies to home defense situations. Even if your threat had no intention of hurting you or getting in a fight, he may become extremely violent if he feels that defeating you is the only way to escape unharmed or with
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 105 his freedom. I’ll talk more about providing escape routes to your threats or attackers in just a moment.
Next, as previously discussed – nighttime tactics, concealment, and illumination will be constant themes. We will be discussing the use of flashlights, the use of movement, and the use of interior static or motion lighting in aspects that are of extreme importance to your attempt to clear your house in the dark.
During the daytime, the tactics involved, the skills involved, and the things you must to be aware of and attentive to will be slightly different. Where important, I will make these notes in our training, but common sense should prevail: if we are discussing how to “slice a corner” while holding a flashlight, the same maneuver can easily be achieved in the daytime without need of a flashlight at all.
And finally: it is important to understand that whatI have called your initial reactive defensive point is always a moving and living and breathing position. For example, even at nighttime, this initial reactive defensive point
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 106 will change based on the demands that exist in your life in that exact moment.
For example, maybe your initial reactive defensive point every night of your children’s lives is at the top of a certain stairway, but if you are subject to a home invasion on the one night when all of your children are spending the night at their grandmother’s house, then it makes no sense to expose yourself to the unnecessary risks that may involve moving from your bedroom to this initial reactive defensive point. Do you see what I mean?
Well, the same realities will exist and will be even more dynamic during daytime hours. That is, of course, because you and your family are always moving around and are active during the day.
For example, if a stranger jumps your backyard fence during the day when your entire family is upstairs helping their mother fold laundry and you just happened to be looking out your back sliding door, your initial reactive defensive will be much different than if this unwelcome stranger (let’s say he is fleeing the police through neighborhood yards) is running straight for your entire family who is sitting with their backs to him at a picnic table.
These kinds of hypotheticals can be stretched infinitely. The bottom line is: always keep in mind that where you happen to be at the moment that you realize a threat is present and is trying to or has already gained entry to your property or home may always be different during the evening or nighttime hours, and it almost certainly will be different, very different, during the daytime hours. As
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 107 we already discussed, that point will almost never, ever be wherever you HOPE you are when you have to face that threat.
Hence the concept of the “initial reactive defensive point”– which is again, simply speaking, the most advantageous place where you can be standing or crouched or hidden or holed up or barricaded when you are forced to defend yourself in your home. If or when you have to move from the place where you were when you are alerted to the attack, to your firearm, and then back to that initial reactive defensive point, the distances between those various positions that you will visit in the course of that situation all must be moved to and from with extreme care and caution. The situation will change from second to second.
Your initial indication may have been doors slamming. You may have looked out the window to see three guys with masks sprinting from their car to your front door. Your PLAN might be to retrieve your firearm and then get to a kitchen counter that gives you perfect vision and a safe firing line to that front door. That is your PLAN. But
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 108 your REALITY may be that while you are still trying to retrieve your firearm, the door is kicked in and before you can emerge from the bathroom or closet or a corner with your firearm, two of those threats are already coming down the hallway and will get a visual on you in about one more second.
All of this is simply to explain and demonstrate that these situations are always going to be fluid. That is why you must rely on all the same skills that we have worked hard to develop together for within the realm of concealed carry – namely in this example, situational awareness and situational analysis.
You must have the awareness of how much the situation will likely change before you can retrieve your firearm, and you must have a plan to spin around from that closet or bathroom or corner with firearm hand, completely ready to begin defending your home from that point forward.
CHAPTER 32: BEGINNING A SCENARIO: THE BUMP IN THE NIGHT
So here it is, the middle of the night. You have heard a noise that has alarmed you, but since you didn’t hear anything else while you were retrieving your firearm, we are considering this an “alarm” scenario.
Your first step is of course to move to the place you have determined is your “initial reactive defense point.”
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 109 CHAPTER 33: THE CRITICAL NEED FOR BEING “SWITCHED ON”
From this moment until you lay back in bed, content that your property and house were never in any danger to begin with, you must be “switched on.” By this, I mean fully alert, fully committed, and totally given to the situation at hand. To get a full understanding of what I mean here, you can liken yourself to an animal, remembering that you have six senses (the normal five, plus your intuition) that are all phenomenal tools for helping to keep you safe and alive.
Daily human events force you to “switch off” most of these senses at most times, because to exist in a state where you are completely given over to what you are hearing or seeing would at least be wildly distracting, to say the least. Imagine trying to drive your car WITHOUT being able to tune out your arguing kids? When at work, you focus. And when focused, you are by definition tuning out, or “switching off.”
Well, the opposite must happen now in this scenario. As I said: you must be “switched on.” The more you practice this, the better you will get at it. Not to say that you will have a hard time getting in the zone at night, facing the prospect of the dozens of dark corners and rooms in your house after hearing a noise caused, quite possibly, by a
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 110 criminal threat! But you would be surprised.
Checking out noises can become so routine and mundane - and the posture we must adapt to do so effectively can be cause for ridicule or embarrassment from spouses who might see it as overreacting – that, many is the guardian before you who has tromped down the stairs, pistol casually hanging by his side, with a grin on his face because he knows “I am probably being ridiculous, but…”
But I say, “if you’re going to do something, do it well.” And if you are investigating the possibility of a criminal presence, now is not the time to be concerned about embarrassment. Or to cut corners. Or to get lax. You are doing this because you know that there is a slightly elevated chance that you might encounter a criminal NOW as opposed to during your regular day to day.
And so: “switch on.”
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 111 CHAPTER 34: TACTICS
Next we must discuss what I call “tactical movement.”
But first, we must discuss “tactics.”
What is a tactic? A tactic, as it relates to personal protection, is simply: how, where, when, and WHAT to do (and this next part is key) in a way that is SAFE for you… And DANGEROUS to your threats.
To repeat that in slightly different terms: a tactic is what to do and how to do it, and how to do it in a way that is safe for you and dangerous for the bad guy.
That is what a tactic is. What separates GOOD tactics from BAD tactics is the measure of exactly HOW safe you can be while doing it… and how DANGEROUS you can make it for a threat or potential threat while you are doing it.
What separates VERY good tactics from PRETTY good tactics is: how open to other options that action leaves you.
To summarize here, if you are smart, you will do things in ways that leave you as many options as possible and leave
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 112 you as safe as possible and leave you as best prepared from minute to minute and second to second to defend yourself.
CHAPTER 35: TACTICAL MOVEMENT
So, let’s continue to keep it simple and break it down: what is movement? Getting from point A to point B.
When I use the phrase “tactical movement,” I mean: “here is how to get from point A to point B in a way that leaves you as safe as possible, with as many options as possible, and in a way that will allow you to defend yourself as easily as possible.
To get an idea of what this looks like, consider the image created a minute ago, of the self-conscious guardian sloppily moving down his stairs, pistol hanging loosely at his side. Ask yourself: does walking down the stairs this way leave you well equipped enough to defend yourself from one second to the next? How could that be improved?
One idea is, to walk more lightly and carefully. If you walk down the stairway in full force and with a little care, you will probably be making the stairs creak, the fall of your feet will make noise, your clothes will rustle against themselves, your joints may crack, you may cast
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 113 a shadow at the foot of the stairs, and you may even trip and stumble, making a lot of noise or even falling down. To delve deeper, you must reckon with the fact that when you walk in a sloppy way, your head and eyes bob around a little bit.
This makes it much harder for your ingrained predator senses to quickly identify movement directly in front of you or especially in your periphery. A sloppy walk also translates through your subconscious and senses and can cause you to not be as “switched on” as you ought to be. Because remember: on that walk down the stairs, you need to be listening for more data – any indication that could confirm the worst suspicions that you gained moments ago while lying in bed at the initial “bump in the night.”
So how do you improve that walk, and to walk more lightly and carefully? First, move in a way that keeps your head as stationary as possible. Slow down your pace so that you do not get ahead of your awareness and senses. Become much lighter and more certain on your feet. Every step should be intentional.
Instead of dropping your feet, set them down carefully, as if they are part of a hydraulic mechanism designed to set a spacecraft carefully down on a foreign planet. Move
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 114 your body slowly and intentionally. Use the knowledge that you have (which a potential threat does not have) about your home and its various intricacies. For example, in this hypothetical here moving down the stairs, you already know which stairs cause loud groans and creaks, and you know how to avoid them.
Take advantage of all of that knowledge. When you walk, spread your legs slightly to avoid the rustling of clothes, and pay attention to where and how you cast shadows. If it does turn out that there is a threat, you absolutely must avoid allowing him to turn the tables on you and set up his own ambush as you check things out. In order to do this, all he requires is the slightest indication that somebody might be coming. Again: watch your shadows.
Similarly, hide your silhouette as much as possible. In this hypothetical here, you should stay close to one of the walls as opposed to walking down the center of the stairway. If you are close to a wall in a dark room or corridor, the threat may not even see you even if he DOES take an intentional glance with peering eyes into that room.
But, if you are in the middle of the room or the middle of the hallway or the middle of the stairway, the odds that you will be seen are much higher.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 115 Finally, crouch. When revisiting that initial question, “how can I do this in a safer way,” there is one thing left to improve about your walk going down the stairway. That is: make yourself even harder to spot while also becoming a smaller target to shoot at by crouching.
Therefore, you should crouch while you walk. How much? This will differ based on your own physical flexibility and fitness levels but remember that other portion of what separates good tactics from bad tactics – good tactics leave you with more options available. If you are crouched too low, it may be harder to react to certain developments. Or it may become hard to actually use your firearm.
You want to crouch to the point where you begin seeing ‘diminishing tactical returns,’ and then back off and straighten up a little from there. That is how much you personally should crouch while you walk in a tactical fashion.
I hope this exercise was helpful – the exercise where we consider walking down the stairway. What I want you to gain from this exercise are two things:
First, that the realm of “tactics” is not reserved for the
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 116 elite. It is not reserved for people who have served in the military or for police officers. It is not reserved for people who have spent thousands of dollars to attend fancy shooting courses (by the way, the lessons gained in these kinds of courses often leaves MUCH to be desired), and “tactics” are not complicated or confusing.
The moment they BECOME complicated, in fact, is the moment they lose all tactical value. Tactics are simple. They have to be. Tactics are common sense.
The second conclusion I would like you to draw from this exercise is that “tactics” belong to you. They belong to you because you are a living, breathing human being who was created or who has evolved (I say created) to be the number one predator on this planet. If anybody can think of tactics, it is you.
If anybody can think of good tactics, it is you. And if anybody can design the best tactics to use within your own home, you are easily the best person for that job – and in fact you may be the only person for that job.
Remember how simple it all is. We took you tromping down the stairs, and we simply asked: “how can you do this same thing, complete this same objective, but do so in a way that is safer for you and that leaves you better equipped to defend yourself?” That’s all it takes. “Tactical Movement.” This is something that people have written books about.
Things police officers and military personnel have to be taught by instructors. By using your own mind, you
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 117 can arrive at every single similar conclusion in about 60 seconds. So again: please trust yourself. I would like to begin right now a pattern in your life where, rather than looking to others for advice on how best to handle yourself with self-defense, you begin to rely more and more on yourself.
With instruction like what you are reading right now, or what you gain from any of my training material and videos at my Concealed Carry University, you can become a self-contained powerhouse with regard to personal protection. You are already well on your way.
CHAPTER 36: TACTICAL MOVEMENT INDOORS
Up ‘til now, we have discussed what a tactic is, what movement is, and have applied the rules of good tactics to this hypothetical of moving down some stairs. Now, I want to throw a couple more requirements into the mix. First, you must understand and accept the notion that there are no fixed definitions or ideas of what constitutes “tactical movement.”
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 118 The movement that is the “most tactical” (or the movement that leaves you as safe as possible, with as many options as possible, and as best equipped to defend yourself as possible) will change based on your environment. For example, what good tactical movement will look like when crossing a wide-open area will be different than what it will look like when going down the stairs.
Turning a corner will look different than traversing a hallway. Walking down the sidewalk in the middle of the day will look different than walking down the same sidewalk at night. And on and on and on.
The point here is that what constitutes effective tactical movement within your home will change dramatically from one step to the next. And now you know why, because the best way to round the corner is not the same as the best way to move down a hallway, and so on and so forth.
What we’re discussing here are the very beginnings of how to “clear” a house. You will hear this phrase very often from this point forward: “house clearing.” How to
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 119 clear house. It’s a simple phrase, it means simply: how to make sure there are no bad guys in or around your house so that you can go back to sleep in peace.
Continuing through this guide, I will attempt to cover all aspects of how to properly clear a house. This will involve the automatic and unconscious use of several skills, tactical movement being one of them. That’s why I’m breaking it down this way and will cover them each individually.
If you practice the skills individually, independent of each other, and do so enough to the point where it becomes comfortable and natural, you will begin to be able to pair these skills together. And when you do that, you will be able to effectively clear your house, and by maintaining this kind of quality tactical action up until that moment, you will find yourself in a phenomenal position for surviving and defeating an encounter with a burglar or home invader or a team of them around any corner.
CHAPTER 37: TACTICAL MOVEMENT INDOORS WITH A HANDGUN
I’m going back to our hypothetical example. You have excellent movement now as you move down the stairway. However, your pistol is still held sloppily at your side.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 120 When asked once again “how can you get down those stairs in a way that leaves you with as many self-defense options as possible, and keep you as safe as possible, and keeps a potential threat who might round that corner in as dangerous a position as possible…” What else can you do better?
The answer is very simple, right? You should not hang your pistol down sloppily at your side. Instead, you should raise that pistol and point it ahead of you.
The first question is, should it be pointed directly at where you’re looking, or slightly down low at the floor, beneath where you are looking? The answer to this question must be driven by two things, and two things alone: the steadiness of your nerves and the degree to which you trust your awareness and senses.
The reason it matters? Because you need to be able to identify somebody who comes around a corner or who is already in the room in a fraction of a second. If for any reason you think there is a chance that you might instinctively fire at somebody who rounds a corner BEFORE you can accurately identify them as being a threat or an ally… then aside from needing to work on your nerves and awareness
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 121 and practicing your home clearing drills enough to where you can conduct them at night without being rattled, you probably should point your weapon at the floor in front of you.
This will make a negligent discharge of the weapon much safer for everybody else. It will also force you to take an extra fraction of a second to identify anybody you encounter as you raise your weapon toward them.
CHAPTER 38: FIREARM SAFETY WHILE CLEARING YOUR HOUSE
Listen… this is only the first of what will be a lot of squeamish talk inside this guide. But you cannot afford to pull any punches. My Concealed Carry University has attained the renown that it has because for eight years I have shrugged off even a single penny from any advertiser or sponsor.
I’ve taken money from no one, and my future success depends on nobody. This means I can afford to speak bluntly and plainly about the uncomfortable truths involved with self-defense. I don’t have to call A GUN a “personal protection device.” And I don’t have to call A WEAPON a “firearm.” Sometimes I choose to, but it’s healthy for us to be reminded that these 14-ounce objects in our hands have the power to devastate an entire community within three seconds.
And I will not pull any punches when I tell you this: in this country right now, alive today, is a small alumnus
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 122 of shattered, broken, and devastated individuals. This is the alumni of fathers who have killed their own kids by accident. This is the alumni of husbands who have killed their own wives by accident. And this is the alumni of tombstones representing those who have killed themselves by accident with the weapons that they bought to protect those whom they love.
I do not need to tell you: you do not want to join these alumni. You do not want to live or die with the knowledge and the memories of that night you shot your son or your daughter. Holding them as the life bleeds out of them, as they look at you with a face or words that say: “Why??”
I am fortunate in that I’ve never had a gun safety negligence encounter. I have been able to learn my lessons the easy way. The closest call I ever have had was once, when checking the chamber of a firearm that I was sure was unloaded, I discovered that in fact the weapon was chambered. To the outside observer, I did everything right.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 123 I picked up the weapon, they saw me check the chamber, they saw me eject the cartridge and lock the action open, and they saw me remove what was an empty magazine, and they saw me cycle the action several times to ensure that anything in the firing chamber was ejected, and then they saw me lock the action open again before continuing the lesson.
They were none the wiser, and that’s because I followed the safety protocols. But do not ever forget about the existence of this sad, broken alumni. And do not ever forget that every precaution absolutely must be taken in your life to avoid you or anybody you know joining them.
Remember: this whole tangent was brought to you in the middle of this discussion of simply answering the question, “when I walk tactically, do I point my weapon straight in front of me where I would expect to have to shoot? Or do I point it down at the ground?”
CHAPTER 39: WHERE TO POINT YOUR GUN WHILE CLEARING YOUR HOUSE
The best answer is crystal clear: ideally you would want the safety catch off on your weapon, with your finger outside of the trigger guard along its frame, and with that weapon pointed out in front of you. But every individual must make concessions on this point based on their own level of self-trust and skill. Perhaps you will keep your weapon up and at the ready, but with the safety turned on.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 124 Or perhaps you will keep the safety off, but your weapon kept at “low ready.” Or, perhaps you will keep your weapon at “low ready” AND have the safety turned on. Again, only each individual can make this decision for him or herself. This is why I educate and train and speak in terms of the tactical ideal, versus the practical reality.
You now know the tactical ideal, but it’s up to you to apply that to your own situation to come up with a practical reality that you believe is the best balance between safety and effectiveness for you in your life and in each situation.
Lastly, if – by chance – you do not trust yourself at this point with fast and reliable threat or target identification but want to improve to the point where you can exercise this “tactical ideal” of moving through your house with your weapon raised up to eye level, then there are things you can do to propel you to that point fairly quickly. In fact, there’s really only one thing TO do – and that is, PRACTICE.
Earlier, I spoke of how developing the ability to effectively clear your house requires the assembly of several key skill groups. Only by achieving a level of subconscious automation of each of these skill groups can you then exercise them all simultaneously while moving throughout
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 125 your house in the dark in a way that will allow you to effectively engage any threat that you encounter around any given corner.
Well, this question of getting better and faster and safer at house clearing is exactly when that whole notion becomes prominent. For example, you can consider that the first requirement of being able to effectively clear your house is to know your house’s floor plan intuitively – even with your eyes closed.
The second step could, in theory, be to know the idiosyncrasies and intricacies of your house by heart – again, things such as “where the floor creaks” or “how close you have to be to a certain motion light in order to cause it to engage.” Once these two goals are accomplished, you could say that the third step is to assess and analyze your house through the eyes of a criminal to determine where the most likely points of entry will be.
The fourth step would be the theoretical exercise we discussed earlier, where you time how long it would take a threat who has just breached each of those entry points to get to certain positions in your house.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 126 A fifth step could be to analyze the areas of your house that would make good defensive points compared to those that would make very bad defensive points. You can do this analysis through the eyes of a home defender and through the eyes of a criminal.
Where do you want the criminal to get caught? Where do you absolutely NOT want yourself to get caught? Next, a sixth step could be to begin developing yourself as a warrior by first practicing “tactical movement” toward the point of efficiency and throughout your house.
Finally, to bring you back up to the current point in this chronology of clearing your home, you begin to develop the ability to not only move tactically throughout your house, but to move tactically with a handgun at the ready through your house.
By doing this enough, you will develop the physical confidence and skill and – more importantly – the discipline to maintain your awareness and clear thinking while you are practicing all of the skills together, within the context of being subconsciously aware of those various advantages, disadvantages, choke points, or ambush points that you are aware of in your own floor plan. In doing so enough during practice, you
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 127 may very well get to the point where you just know in your gut, “I feel comfortable clearing my house while keeping my firearm up to eye level and at the ready.”
CHAPTER 40: WEAPON RETENTION WHILE CLEARING YOUR HOME
In any case, whether kept at low ready or high ready, there are other things to think about. Remember to keep it SIMPLE! Keep coming back to those basic questions that you have; where you think of it in the simplest problem- solving terms:
“I think they’re MIGHT possibly be somebody in my house. It makes no sense to go back to sleep until I check it out. In order to check it out, I’ve got to move throughout my house. The act of doing this will – if there actually IS a threat - put me in danger as I move around. So [are you ready for it?] how can I move around and check out my house to make sure nobody is in here in such a way that is as safe as possible for ME, but as dangerous as possible for THEM?”
Does that make sense? If so, excellent. Keep coming back to these simple questions, because doing this will help you to maintain the perfect perspective on this topic. Remember: you own this. There is no reason to feel intimidated by it. This is a simple problem and it requires a simple solution, and you absolutely are the person for the job.
So, at this point, we have YOU hypothetically moving down the stairs in a “combat crouch” utilizing every known aspect of “tactical movement.” What’s more, now
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 128 you are keeping your weapon up and at the ready. But what ELSE should you be doing with your weapon? How ELSE should your movement change or be affected based on the fact that you are holding a weapon?
Let’s answer this question in full.
First of all, it’s IMPERATIVE that you keep control and possession of your weapon. This is known as the field of “weapon retention,” or “firearm retention,” or “handgun retention.”
Many people teach the stuff, but it all comes down to one simple notion: making sure that you never give your adversary the opportunity to grab the weapon out of your hand. And, if he does manage to grab it, you need to be able to make him let go of it before he pulls it out of your hand. That is weapon retention in a nutshell, it is no more complicated and no simpler than that.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 129 So how can you change the way you move throughout your house to ensure that you are not risking letting a criminal around the corner to snatch your weapon from your hand? And how can you do ALL OF this, while STILL retaining the effectiveness of that weapon?
That is the question that should be on your mind. And here are the two simple ways how your movement throughout your house should be informed and changed based on these concerns:
First, keep your weapon pulled in close to your body. You do not want to do what you see people do in Hollywood police shows or action movies, which is inevitably to adopt full shooting postures while rounding corners. Keeping your pistol pointed that far out in front of you makes no sense in a confined space for exactly the reasons that we’ve mentioned. You want to keep your weapon pulled in close and tucked into your body, while still pointing forward so that you could fire at a moment’s notice should it become necessary.
Second, nobody can grab your weapon if they don’t get close to you. This is easy down a hallway or down a hypothetical stairway, but when rounding corners in particular, given that doorways tend to be a maximum of 48 to 60 inches wide, but are usually as narrow as 30 inches, this concern becomes very real.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 130 I have heard many stories and seen in many practice drills weapons get snatched from people’s hands in situations exactly like this. I already covered the first half of effective weapon retention when rounding points: keep your weapon pulled in close to your body. The second half of this equation is: don’t hug the corners. Round corners with enough distance from them as would be required to prevent anyone from reaching out and grabbing your weapon.
If space is a luxury (for example, when rounding a large corner of a room), this is as simple as staying as far back as you can (or practically need to) from the corner that you are turning.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 131 CHAPTER 41: MOVING THROUGH DOORWAYS
If space is not a luxury, such as turning a narrow doorway, a few other considerations must be taken. First, move as far back from the corner as possible, and slowly edge around the corner while sidestepping. Sidestepping will ensure that you maintain as stable of an upper body posture and shooting stance as possible.
Keep your weapon pointed in front of you in case a threat is waiting for you directly on the other side of the corner. Understand in advance that rounding corners is the most dangerous point of clearing any building. They are matched in danger only with what we have called choke points or shooting lanes up to this point. By staying as far from the corner as possible, while keeping the weapon pulled in as tightly as possible, and while keeping that weapon pointed ahead of you, you’ll be moving in a way that minimizes your danger and maximizes your effectiveness.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 132 If you are using a handgun, consider keeping your offhand at the low ready, with your pistol pointed above and clear of it, as you round the corner. If there happens to be a threat on the other side of that doorway, and if he reached out to snatch your pistol upon seeing you, your off hand will be prepared and ready to counter that swipe or to assist you in gaining back control of your pistol.
CHAPTER 42: KEEP YOUR WEAPON WHERE YOU CAN CONTROL IT
While not exactly something you can prepare in a few days, having a strong grip is extremely helpful with regard to weapon retention. It is possible to outclass other people in grip strength, even when the rest of your body is comparatively weaker.
Next, if somebody ever grabs your pistol, be aware that it takes very little force to pinch the slide against the frame, keeping it from cycling. Whether they do this intentionally or simply get lucky, they only have to push the slide back away from its natural resting point about 1/8 of an inch in order to do what’s called “throwing the pistol out of battery.”
This makes it impossible for you to fire a shot. This won’t happen most of the time, as many simulated gun fights have proven to me, meaning that even if somebody grabs your pistol, you should at least have one good shot with which to get them. Firing your pistol may cause them to let go of it. But don’t count on that.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 133 If somebody grabs your pistol, work as hard as you can to point it at them and fire. This will be no easy task, because the first thing they will do after they grab your pistol will be to try everything in their power to rip it from your hand. If they are skilled, they will begin twisting your pistol out and away from your body as fast as possible. If they are stronger than you, the pistol will be bent around, breaking or even severing your finger from its socket until it is pointing right back at you.
If they are not skilled, they will simply be flailing with all their strength to keep the pistol pointed anywhere but at them. You want to do everything in your power to avoid letting them get control of your pistol, and perhaps your best opportunity will be early on, when you fire that first shot.
I should note here that if the handgun you are using for home defense is a revolver (which is not ideal for the reasons we discussed earlier) you, at the very least, will have an advantage in terms of handgun retention. This notion of having your semi-automatic pistol “thrown out of battery” will not be a concern to you, but the same rules will apply with regard to the threat potentially squeezing
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 134 your revolver tightly enough to prevent the cylinder from spinning.
If this happens, you are actually at a disadvantage over the semi-automatic pistol user, because the revolver must cycle its cylinder 20° or 15° to the next chamber before it can fire. Again: you can use any tool you wish; the important thing is that you understand where it is strong and where it is weak; what its advantages and what its disadvantages are in any given situation.
CHAPTER 43: REELING AND PUSHING YOUR PISTOL: RETENTION vs ACCURACY
The final point that I want to share with regard to moving throughout your house with a handgun has to do, again, with the balance between safety and effectiveness – or more specifically in this case, handgun retention and accuracy.
To demonstrate this point, imagine that you have to round two different and unique corners. One corner is a very narrow doorway. The other corner is that which connects a large living room to a wide hallway.
In terms of the kind of pistol accuracy that may be demanded
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 135 of you, you can instinctively understand that when you move through a very narrow doorway, the threat you are most concerned about is the one who could be standing on the immediate opposite end of that corner.
And that is why you pull that handgun in tightly to your body before and while rounding that corner – but, you also can understand that as soon as you prove there is no threat immediately on the other side of that corner, your next most dangerous threats are obviously those further away from said corner, who may exist anywhere within the corridor or room you are entering, or who themselves have set up in bushes at the windows or doorways pointing into the room that you are about to enter.
The point I’m driving at here is that different accuracy requirements to survive various engagements in that situation are going to change dramatically and very quickly. For example, as you immediately round the corner, you might have to engage a threat who is only 3 feet away from you.
This requires absolutely zero use of your handgun sights. Instinctively firing as fast as you can from 3 feet will allow you to connect with that threat for at least half of your shots. That is because at 3 feet you will have the opportunity to spread your shots up to 25° and still hit your attacker’s body. The moment you clear that corner, should you begin taking fire from across the room, you may now suddenly find yourself with the requirement of scoring accurate hits against a threat who is 15 or 20 or 25 feet away from you. To do this, you will need a very different shooting stance and posture than holding your pistol in tight to your body. Right?
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 136 You will need to be in a full shooting position, possibly even benching yourself against the doorway that you are moving through.
CHAPTER 44: BE A MOVING TARGET
And I must add a side note here: that standing still to return fire inside of close quarters like this is probably not the best thing that you can do for your survival. What I mean is, in this situation, it will be imperative to re- stack your priorities so that your first goal is to AVOID the fire of your threat, whereas your second goal becomes to actually hit him.
The solution for this is that you get moving and make yourself a moving target at very least, or at most to realize that your threat has a better position than you and that engaging him effectively and safely is simply impossible. In that case, you would perform a tactical retreat back to a safer position.
If you really are at a point where you are taking fire from that determined of a threat, you would need to let
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 137 go of any hope of regaining control of that part of your house, and only if you have loved ones on the other side of him should you even attempt to “counterattack” such a determined and well-positioned threat. We will talk about how to counterattack a threat like this later on, and we already do in a great number of our training pieces that we’ve produced through Concealed Carry University.
For now, this exceeds the scope of the important points we are trying to make at this stage of your development.
The point here is that as you move through your house with your handgun, you will find that (if you get to the point where you do it correctly and with effectiveness and efficiency) you are constantly pushing your hand gun out in front of you and then reeling it back in as you round corners, move through open spaces, or down corridors. When you round the corner, you will reel your gun in. As you round the corner, you’ll gradually push it back out.
Now, in a building clearing situation, especially in the dark, you will almost never find yourself with your weapon pushed out all the way in front of you in a full- on shooting stance. Instead, you’ll be reeling back-and- forth from what we call a “close high retention” shooting position out to a “partial high retention” shooting position.
This is simply because, in the dark, we cannot rely too heavily on our own abilities to see all threats and to react to them as quickly as may be necessary.
As we move onto the next section, I want to point out the fact that until now we have only discussed tactical movement and moving tactically while holding a
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 138 handgun with the intention of using it should this become necessary. I have intentionally NOT discussed moving with a long gun, moving with or how and when to use a flashlight, and whether or not to announce your armed presence before or during your house clearing action.
I also haven’t mentioned what to do if you get more indication through your ears or eyes that there is, or at least was, a threat in your house while you are clearing, and I of course haven’t explained what to do and how to fight should you actually encounter a threat.
These critical topics have been left out until now because it’s important to cover this in a logical ordering that will allow you to build one skill on top of the other, and I personally prefer to learn and train through the context of a hypotheticals like those we have been examining. With that said, please trust in the order in which this training is broken down, and let’s proceed.
CHAPTER 45: TO AND FROM YOUR INITIAL REACTIVE DEFENSIVE POINT: YOUR FIRST STEPS
Now that we’ve covered the basics of both tactical movement and moving through your house with a weapon, let’s return to the very first hypothetical, the one that takes place within the “alarm” scenario wherein you or your spouse has heard a “bump in the night” that has pushed you out of bed as quickly as possible and to your safely but effectively stored home defense weapon.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 139 Now is when you turn around, weapon in hand, and begin moving to what you have identified on this particular night to be your “initial reactive defensive point.”
In this example, let’s say that you have determined that your “initial reactive defensive point” is to stand at the top of the stairway immediately outside your bedroom door and across the landing, with your handgun pointing down the stairs at another landing, which then rotates 180° with one more flight of stairs, which pops out into the living room of this house.
Now, you know exactly how you will move from where your weapon is stored to the bedroom doorway: using tactical movement and in a combat crouch. You know exactly how you will round the corner of your bedroom and out onto this landing. You know the sort of position you will take at the top of this stairway; crouched, with your weapon pointing down the stairs…
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 140 CHAPTER 46: TAKING A ‘PRUDENT PAUSE’ FOR SITUATIONAL AWARENESS AND ANALYSIS
Here at this point, since you have been able to reach your initial reactive defensive point without encountering a threat, you can breathe your first sigh of relief. Take stock: you were not caught in bed with a muzzle to your head; a threat did not breach every redline inside your house up to your bedroom door.
You managed to get armed with an effective weapon. And now, you have actually managed to make it to this initial reactive defensive point, which puts you – if it is well chosen – in a position of phenomenal tactical superiority.
Or at least… this would be true if the threat hasn’t already bypassed your initial reactive defensive point… and is already in one of the other rooms… standing around you or between you and the bedroom that you just came from. Do you see what I mean?
So, at this point, you have to make a decision. Do you need to backtrack to check the bathroom that you also walked by? Do you need to check on your kids to make sure they are safe, or that they are still in bed? Is it possible that
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 141 one of your kids got out of bed to go and get a drink or use the bathroom, and it was them that caused the noise?
If so, or for the reason that a threat may possibly have made it past this initial reactive defensive point of yours before you could get there, you may decide it’s important and necessary to backtrack and quickly clear the spaces or check on your dependents before proceeding. If this is important, now’s the time to do it.
In doing so, you just want to make sure that you maintain a visual on your initial reactive defensive point. For example, you won’t go all the way into each child’s bedroom. You would stand in the doorway while keeping most of your attention at the top of that stairway while you glance into each bedroom to make sure everybody is where they need to be.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 142 In doing so, you may determine that the bump in the night was indeed most likely caused by a kid who is no longer in bed, or perhaps a child who had woken up in their room and had the lamp on and was playing – it could be anything. But if this scan doesn’t reveal any new information, then you return back to your initial reactive defensive point.
Once you are there, or if you never left because you didn’t need to check out any of the rooms around you (or if there were not any to check out) now is the time do what I call taking a pause for the sake of situational awareness and analysis.
You will do this many times as you clear your house, and you will do it at each point where you identify and observe that, by reaching that point, you now hold a disproportionate tactical advantage over anybody who might be in front of you.
For example, you would never stop in the middle of an open space to “take a pause for the sake of situational awareness and analysis.” You wouldn’t do this because it puts you in a vulnerable position, observable by several other entry points, and without any cover or concealment in which to hide.
Instead, you would wait until you got to a position where you can be partially or completely hidden where you can observe those around you better, if there was anybody. You would take this pause in a place where, should somebody appear around you with armed and violent intent, you would stand an advantage against them because of the cover and concealment or field of vision that you have.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 143 CHAPTER 47: WHY WE TAKE PRUDENT PAUSES
The reasons to pause for the sake of situational awareness and analysis are twofold:
First, we recognize that if there is an intruder in your house, they are possibly moving through it looking for the house’s occupants. If you encounter that person, you do not want it to be when you both face an equal tactical advantage, or you especially do not want it to be when he has heard or seen you coming and is able to maneuver against you and set up his own ambush.
By pausing, you recognize that you have achieved a superior position, and you give him a little bit of time to come to you. By doing this sort of leapfrog and pause strategy as you move throughout your house, you try as much as possible to get the best of both worlds.
First, you get the benefits of “staying put” and “letting them come to you.”
Second, you get the benefits of “getting moving” and putting yourself between a potential threat and those who you love and have a duty to protect.
Finally, you do what you must in terms of investigating the sources of unknown “bumps in the night,” which you must to do in order to be able to go back to sleep in peace.
I mentioned that the reasons why we pause for the sake of
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 144 situational awareness and analysis are twofold. The first one is what we just covered: it gives you the best of both worlds in that it allows you to adopt both an offensive and defensive posture at once. The second reason is:
You need to be able to listen and observe to try to collect as much helpful “data” on this situation as is possible. It’s hard to do that when you are moving around and breathing and making noise, and when your eyes and senses are constantly scanning your environment.
CHAPTER 48: HOW LONG TO PAUSE
The pause can really be as long as you would like, but it may be driven by the urgency of your situation.
For example, if this is a regular “peacetime” bump in the night and you do not care if you ARE being robbed elsewhere in your house or on your property, so long as you do not have to confront any violent or potentially violent threat, then you may choose to stand there in your initial reactive defensive point for as many as three or five minutes. The sky is the limit.
If you hold a tactical advantage, there is absolutely no urgency. It’s not like this is a battlefield situation where you have to be concerned that somebody is going to set your house on fire just to smoke you out. However, if you really need to get downstairs because it’s a time of famine and you need to make sure your pantry is not being raided, you might only pause in your initial reactive defensive point for 5 or 10 seconds. That much is up to you
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 145 and you will be the best judge based on your knowledge of your current situation and its demands.
CHAPTER 49: WHAT DO YOU DO WHILE PAUSING FOR THE SAKE OF SITUATIONAL AWARENESS AND ANALYSIS?
You are listening. You are sensing. You are focusing. Surely, you’re keeping your pistol pointed down into your shooting lane, in case a threat actually does appear. But you are trying as hard as you can during this time to use your senses to pick up any additional “data.” And what do we mean by data? Anything.
Even the absence of data in this particular situation is data itself: no new noises may suggest that whatever caused you to get out of bed is of no concern whatsoever.
You are especially listening for other noises. Your goals are to try to get a full picture of what is happening.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 146 For example, if you hear noises that you think suggests that somebody is already in your kitchen, that is going to change how you proceed from this point. If you hear noises that suggest that somebody is out on your front porch, then that is going to change things. Or, if you were hearing muffled conversation: do you recognize the voices? Is it somebody who lives in your house? If it’s an intruder, does it sound like more than one or two? Can you hear what they are discussing?
You are listening for footsteps. You are listening for anything breaking. You are looking and watching. Do you see any shadows being cast out on the floor or against any walls? If you do, what can you gain from the sight of those shadows?
Here, I will pause to give another anecdote. Earlier I mentioned that only once in my “career” as a homeowner have, I had a “danger scenario” in which I chose to go for my M4 rifle instead of a handgun. I also mentioned that the perpetrator in the situation was a young and extremely intoxicated man who later told police that he was looking for his uncle’s house, which was over 250 miles away in Detroit.
What I didn’t tell you is that I never saw the man until he was already arrested. Here’s how the situation transpired:
I woke up suddenly at 3AM with the distinct feeling that something was happening. I sat up in bed and looked at the clock. As I was standing up, I heard a loud thump from directly below my bedroom. My wife and I had only one child at this time in our marriage, and he was very young - still an infant.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 147 Immediately I took six steps to the wall above a very tall dresser and retrieved my M4 carbine. My wife was by this time sitting up in bed, asked what was happening - she hadn’t heard either noise yet.
As I quietly closed the rifle’s action onto a loaded chamber, for some reason that I can’t explain or defend, I only said to her: “show time!”(And you can be certain that if lethal force had been required in the situation, I never would’ve repeated this fact! Nowadays, I would give my wife a much more informational assessment of what was going on).
I quietly slipped out of the bedroom, moved across the landing, and pointed the rifle down the stairs. I paused. Once again, I heard thumping on the front porch. The front porch in this house, which we were renting at the time, was down the stairs, 90° to the left, down another flight of stairs, and immediately to your right when you stepped off the very last stair. There was an exterior door, and on the other side of that was the porch.
We had absolutely nothing worth dying for in the bottom half of the house, and I knew that I retained a complete tactical advantage. My rifle was ready. I hadn’t turned any lights on upstairs which would have given any indication that I was aware of the presence of this individual.
I believed that if he entered the house and began robbing, I would whisper to my wife to call the police and report a robbery. I would stand there and let them take anything they wanted, hoping the police would catch them in the act. But I decided that I wouldn’t move. If they came up
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 148 the stairs, following a brief visual on the target, they would be dead before they rounded the corner.
But of course, at this point, I only had a total of maybe four thumps out on the front porch to go on. This could’ve been anything, including a possum, raccoon, squirrel, or a bird somehow trapped under the roof of the porch. At this point, I had no reason to suspect anything. (But this is why you take a pause. You are waiting to see.)
After about five seconds of silence, suddenly all hell broke loose. A man’s voice started yelling loudly from the front porch and heavy kicks begin landing on the door and the old, brass door handle was rattling loudly with every kick. My heart jumped to my throat and I immediately crouched.
My wife came running to the bedroom door behind me. I told her: “Call the police, tell them we’re about to have a home invasion and to get here quickly.”
Now the police reaction time was technically very fast. But we later estimated it took them about four minutes to arrive. (At this point in time, my wife and I lived in a city). The man never broke in, and he was dumbfounded when the police lit him up with their spotlights.
But the reason I share this story is because during that four minutes, there were several lulls in which the man appeared to settle down. During one of them, when I was positive he was still out on the front porch and had not broken in, I tiptoed back through the bedroom to look out the front windows.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 149 Our front porch light was on, and the man’s shadow was cast out over the yard. From his shadow, I was able to tell that it was a tall man wearing a baseball cap and who had on baggy short pants. I could tell he was pacing back- and-forth. As soon as I got the most detailed possible description of this individual, I passed it on to my wife who passed it on to police and I returned to my post at the top of the stairs.
The bottom line is, I couldn’t tell from my initial reactive defensive point at the top of the stairs how many people there were, or anything about them.
But by leveraging that pause and the opportunities and considerations it afforded me, I was able to learn for myself and tell the police how many of them there were, and to even get a rough description in case he had left, just in case the police were able to spot this man a couple blocks away while they were on the way to my house.
From your initial reactive defensive point, and from each defensive point that you are you able to make it to while you clear your house, make sure you take this pause. Make sure you follow those tips; use every sense that you have to take stock of your situation and to pick up any new or helpful data that you can.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 150 CHAPTER 50: CALLING THE POLICE: WHEN AND WHERE AND HOW
Finally, even though you most likely won’t be calling the police from any of your initial reactive defensive points simply because you hear a couple noises, it is exactly from these defensive points where a call to the police is best made.
We will discuss this in more detail in the next section, where we talk about the “danger” scenario where you become more certain that you are dealing with an intruder. For now, just understand that you never want to be on the phone as you are clearing your house. You need every possible ounce of attentiveness you have to clear your house safely. Anytime you call the police, it will be from a defensive point. Or, you won’t call them at all. The reason being because it makes no sense to jeopardize your safety in order to call police who absolutely will not get there before the situation has resolved itself in or against your favor.
Remember THIS: the only time you will call the police will be from a defensive point. And if you must keep moving after initially making contact with the police, you will hang the phone up or set it down while leaving it connected as you continue to move through your house.
That said, most likely you will not call the police until you have at least secured the most important thing, your loved ones who depend upon you, and once you have done that, if a call to the police has been warranted then it makes no sense to continue clearing your house. You would in that case retreat with your loved ones back to
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 151 the most easily defended point available and would wait there for the police to arrive. You would let the police do the hard and dangerous work of clearing your house up to your current defensive point.
OK. Now we have covered everything that gets you from your bed or from your “initial reaction” point, to getting you armed and to your “initial reactive defensive point.” Now we will continue this training by moving into the next sections, which will be of help to you as you build your own practice regimen for clearing your house. Let’s continue.
CHAPTER 51: USING A FLASHLIGHT TO CLEAR YOUR HOUSE
The next section that I want to explore is whether and how to use a flashlight to clear your house. And necessarily, this section will contain within it two extremely important sections: the first called “stealth versus intimidation when clearing your house,” and the second being “clearing your house with a long gun as opposed to a handgun.”
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 152 I wanted to save these two sections because we are now ready to discuss the use of flashlights in house clearing, but we absolutely cannot discuss the use of flashlights in house clearing WITHOUT talking about these two aspects of clearing a home: again, stealth versus intimidation, and long guns.
CHAPTER 52: STEALTH VS. INTIMIDATION: THE 2 SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT, AND THE 2 OFFENSIVE POSTURES OF HOME CLEARING
One of the most frequently and intensely contested points of home clearing is summarized by what I called the debate between the two “postures” of offensive movement.
What do I mean by ‘postures’? Think of a man walking down the sidewalk. He is hunched forward, staring at his feet as he walks, dragging his feet, tripping every now and then, his shoulders are hunched forward, and his hands are deep in his pockets. He looks lost, sad, broken, depressed. It’s clear that his mind is not on his walk, but instead lost on some forlorn thought. Now consider a different man walking parallel to him on the other side of the sidewalk.
His chest is puffed out, his head is held upright, his hands are balled into fists, and based on the veins popping out of his arms, you can tell those fists are clenched and his entire body is tight. When a car drives by, his head and torso turn and twist to follow the car until it has driven far past him. As it does, his mouth drops open exposing his teeth, his eyes are wide open, and he is not blinking.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 153 Even though these two individuals are covering the same amount of distance at the same speed, it is very clear that the energy within them (and the intent revealed by their energy) couldn’t be more different from one another.
We would say that one would have a certain posture, and the other would have a different posture. And it’s important to note here that “posture” doesn’t only describe how somebody is holding their body. It describes how they are holding their energy, and how much of that energy they have within them.
How would you describe the first man’s posture? Aggressive? Certainly not. More like: Submissive. Broken. Distant. Crumpled. Now how would you describe the second man’s posture? Relaxed? Chilled out? Absolutely not. This man is aggressive. He is belligerent. He is combative. So, this is what is meant by “posture.”
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 154 When clearing a house, there are two schools of thought on what sort of posture you can or should adopt. We can separate them roughly into two categories:
A stealth posture, and an intimidation posture.
What I want to do now is discuss the pros and cons of each one, and the situations in which one may be more useful to you than the other.
I differ in my opinions on this subject when compared to most people who instruct on home defense. I do not think there is a correct answer. I think either of these postures are useful in certain situations. However, by the time you finish this section I think you will agree with me that there is one posture out of these two that should be our default as guardians and protectors who want to do our jobs and survive, and one posture that we should only reach for in a very limited number of specific types of situations.
Let’s first discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the intimidating house clearing posture.
CHAPTER 53: THE INTIMIDATING HOUSE CLEARING POSTURE
You’ve heard the expression undoubtably that “the best home defense alarm system there is the sound of a pump 12-gauge shotgun [cycling its action].” And there are many people who believe and swear by this philosophy. What they are swearing by is exactly what we are talking
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 155 about now: what it means to have this intimidating house clearing posture.
This is the belief that predators are neither expecting nor interested in a confrontation with an armed homeowner. And, if only the homeowner can make it clear to the intruder that if they stick around, a confrontation is exactly what they are in for, that they will immediately disengage and seek to escape from the house.
This is not an outrageous or asinine idea. We know from the interviews of many criminals that they are absolutely unwilling and uninterested in being seen by, much less in tangling with, a homeowner.
And, I have heard the testimony of people who experienced situations where, in the middle of the day when a burglar presumably expected the homeowner to be gone, being met with or threatened with force caused this exact reaction. In one instance, a burglar flew like Superman through a plate glass window in his panic- driven attempt to escape the house.
However, if your home is broken into at a time or under circumstances in which the perpetrator must have had a
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 156 reasonable degree of suspicion that you were in fact home at the time, then we can assume that simply making him aware of your presence will not cause him to disengage.
Furthermore, given that this is modern America where there are more firearms in this country than there are people, we can assume that a perpetrator who breaks in when he must realistically believe that you are home must ALSO understand that there is a reasonably good chance that you are armed.
Now if we can make those same assumptions when we are standing in our initial reactive defensive points and listening to the sound of glass breaking or our doors been kicked in or footsteps coming down an unseen hallway, we can conclude fairly safely that if this perpetrator understands that you are home and understands that you may be armed and has chosen to CONTINUE with his movements through your house and toward you…
...by making your armed presence known to him, you may in fact NOT cause him to disengage and turn around and leave or run from your house. If he doesn’t run, and if he doesn’t disengage, then what does your announcement of force and strength actually accomplish?
Well, I can tell you that it doesn’t accomplish anything that you are going to like.
For example, until that point, if you have managed to be quiet in your retrieval of your firearm and in your movement to your initial reactive defensive point – and if you haven’t turned any lights on or blasted down
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 157 your stairway with any flashlight, then you could safely conclude that, even though your threat would be wise to assume there is an armed homeowner around every corner and is probably moving through your house accordingly, you actually do retain an element of surprise in that situation.
And if you retain an element of surprise, and if you are in a defensible corridor, then you have a distinct advantage. However… when you announce your presence, whether by cycling an action or by shouting, “I’ve got a gun and I’ve called the police!” you give the perpetrator some critical information in that moment.
First, that you are awake. Second, that you are aware of his presence. Third, you’ve told him exactly where you are. Fourth, you’ve told him you are armed. And fifth, depending on whether you cycled your action or not, you have given him an idea of what kind of firearm you are holding.
Again, giving him this information may possibly induce a panic that will push him out of your house and cause you to effectively win the engagement without having to fire a shot. But what happens if the
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 158 footsteps continued coming? Or what happens if suddenly the footsteps go quiet and you don’t hear another noise?
Well, one thing is this: it’s possible the same thing that would’ve happened had you NOT announced your presence… except, now, the intruder in your home knows exactly where you are, that you’re armed, what you’re armed with, and what your intentions are.
And if the footsteps get close and then quiet down, now it is you who will begin sweating bullets. You will have to ask yourself what this individual is planning. Is he trying to line up a shot through the walls? Can you expect 10, 30, or 60 rifle rounds to come blazing toward you? With that many shots fired, in the modern paper-thin stick-built houses, you will most certainly suffer grave wounds.
Or, can you expect an ex-con felon who served eight years in the Marine Corps to discreetly slice your corner in the blink of an eye while only revealing one eye and the top third of a rifle, who will take you down with one shot?
You see what I mean. You can probably extrapolate what I advocate for in situations like this: do not give any gifts to intruders who have a broken into your home who should already assume that you are home and who should already assume that you are armed. Because that is exactly what you will have given him or them: gifts.
As valuable to you as any kind of noise that they make is, any noise that you make is equally valuable to them. And if you actually tell him where you are through the sound of your voice and what your intentions are… the value
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 159 of that information is GREAT enough to put you in the ground.
Nobody can deny that it would be extremely convenient and extremely relieving if by simply announcing your armed presence you caused your home intruder to run away. This is the dream scenario, the ideal. And it may even be the humanitarian one: the one that preserves life in the greatest quantity.
However… I do not think it is the wisest one from a tactical standpoint. And I would explain it to you this way:
If this individual has chosen this moment to break into your house, he has made his decisions. He has stared probability and natural law in the eye, and he has said: “What I stand to get from this crime is worth more to me than my own life.” And, if what you have is worth more to him than his own life, then I can promise you, dear reader, that it is worth much more to him than your life.
To put it another way, I can promise you that he will not hesitate to kill you where you stand and to kill your loved ones where they sleep to get what he wants, IF he would dare enter your home at night. He has effectively told you this by his actions.
And if that’s the case, is it worth throwing away the only, the ONLY, tactical advantage you have – the element of surprise – on the off chance that you could save his life for him? The life that he has just agreed through his actions that is worth less than stealing from you everything you hold dear? I do not think it is. I would implore you,
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 160 therefore, to think heavily before considering using this intimidating posture when house clearing.
So what exactly am I suggesting?
I am suggesting that you take when I call a stealth approach, or the stealth posture to home clearing.
CHAPTER 54: THE STEALTH POSTURE OF HOME CLEARING
The stealth posture is exactly what its name implies: that when you clear your house, you do it while retaining as much of the element of surprise as possible. No, it is not wise to come face-to-face with a home intruder. But it is even less wise to come face-to-face with one who has had 5 or 10 seconds to prepare for your presence.
Anything that you can do that alerts your threat to your presence stands in opposition to the stealth approach to clearing your house. This includes making noise while you move, issuing warnings with your voice, making noise with your weapon (including cycling its action), or engaging your flashlight.
By clearing your house using
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 161 a stealthy posture, you continue to get the best of both worlds from an offensive and defensive viewpoint.
To clear your house in this posture, you will focus on tactical movement that makes as little noise as possible, and you will rely on your night vision whenever it is adequate and possible.
You will retain the element of surprise, and you will not hesitate (that is, you should not hesitate) to leverage this element of surprise for the benefit of your survival. What I’m saying is: you may have to shoot an armed intruder who hasn’t seen you yet.
Yes, this is a bummer. Nobody wants to shoot somebody in the back. And, you are certainly not obligated to call out, but you can always decide that his life is worth more than yours and you can issue him a warning if you catch him in your sights, whether from a defensive position, or while you are moving through your house.
But again, this is an extremely risky bargain. If you are forced to use your weapon in self-preservation against an armed threat, it is both the absolute best-case and the
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 162 most miserable-case situation that it should be against a threat who is unaware of your presence. I say it’s the worst case, because again: if you shoot him and if he dies from his wounds before an ambulance can arrive, you will never know why he was in your house. Even if he is wearing a mask, it’s possible that your conscience may haunt you later, as you wonder if he was only trying to “steal enough to buy a loaf of bread to feed his family” or something like that.
It’s also entirely possible that, as has happened several times in recent history, you could shoot an intruder only to find that he was the president of his class and captain of his football team and a straight-A student out drunk after his first round of drinking in his life, and that he mistakenly crept into your home, believing it to be his own, not wanting to wake up his parents.
It has happened. That is why you must do what you believe is the right thing in that situation. If you can achieve such a position of tactical superiority, it’s entirely possible that you COULD light him up with your flashlight, see that he’s not holding a weapon, and tell him to stand still until the police arrive or else you will shoot him.
You can tell him to turn the other way and face the other direction. And you can tell him not to move a muscle or else that will be it for him, and you can mean it. And if you are able to resolve a situation like this, kudos to you! He may get arrested, he may get rehabilitated, and he may have a productive life.
As a Christian, I am absolutely an advocate of preserving all life whenever possible, even the life of a criminal,
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 163 but I have simulated and analyzed situations like this to the point of nausea, and I’ve determined that in most situations, the innocent victim exposes him or herself to much risk in attempting to apprehend a threat who is already behaving in such a potentially violent way. And that is why I have a hard time issuing these kinds of warnings.
CHAPTER 55: THE 3 CRITICAL DON’Ts OF ENGAGING INTRUDERS
Now here’s a CRITICAL note. Absolutely NONE of what I am describing here can be confused with a recommendation that we do any of the following:
» Shooting through doors at unknown individuals. (don’t)
» Shooting dark masses that appear to be a criminal. (don’t)
» Shooting at somebody who we are 99% sure is a criminal, but without being 100% sure. (don’t)
These kinds of activities are bound to cause innocent people to get killed, likely even your own family members. This is why I spent so much time earlier talking about the importance of target or threat identification and cautioning you about the existence of the “sad, shattered alumni” in America.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 164 Instead, when I speak of leveraging the element of surprise, I am referring to doing so only against a 100% CLEARLY IDENTIFIED threat to your safety and the safety of your family.
You will know this kind of threat when you see it. If you see a young adult in your home wearing nice clothes who is not holding a weapon, not making any attempt to conceal his or her identity, and appears confused or disoriented or even totally at ease and comfortable, as if they might believe they’re in their own house, then obviously: hold your fire. Get into a position of tactical superiority, and issue that warning.
When you issue a warning of this nature, do not do so in a conversational tone. Do not pull any punches. At the top of your lungs, you want to overwhelm him with the knowledge that he is seen, understood and made, and in grave danger.
At the same instant that you light him up with your flashlight, for example, begin shouting again and again at the top of your lungs “get on the ground now, get on the ground now, get on the ground now!!” and “Spread out your hands! Spread out your hands! Spread out your hands!!”
The intensity and volume of your voice is what will save their life. Anything less, especially if they were an intruder with malicious intent, may give them the idea that you are not in earnest, and you may be in for an engagement.
Lastly, before we move on, I need to mention this: There is, in fact, at least one circumstance in which I do
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 165 recommend that you use the intimidating posture, over and above the stealth posture. I recommend it when you are completely outgunned, outwitted, or outmaneuvered.
In other words: if you ever discover there’s an intruder prowling around your house, and believe that he may suspect you’re sleeping… but in a situation where you are unarmed and in a very vulnerable position… this is the time to become all ‘bark.’
While there may be some room for attempting to hide through a burglary, I can’t condone this strategy after hearing so many heartbreaking stories where doing so has resulted in terrible loss for the homeowner. Given that, I recommend that if you ever find yourself in such an unfortunate position, you break the silence, from a hidden position, with every ounce of intimidation that you can muster.
Shout your head off at this assailant as if you’re a USMC drill instructor. You’ve got a gun. The police are on the way. If they step one foot in your direction they are dead, dead, dead. Be loud. Be repetitive. Be profane. In that situation, it’s the best you’ve got.
CHAPTER 56: CLEARING YOUR HOUSE WITH FLASHLIGHTS
And now we arrive at: clearing your house with a flashlight.
To go back to our hypothetical scenario, in which YOU are clearing your house, we have up to this point coached you
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 166 on how to move tactically, and how to move tactically with a handgun in your hand. But we have left out one very important detail. And that detail becomes apparent when we ask ourselves this same question once again:
“If you are going to move through a dark house with a handgun in your hand, searching for a suspected or potential intruder, how can you do so in a way that is safer for you and more dangerous for the bad guy?”
Well, the answer is obvious: you put a flashlight in your hand.
A good, high-quality “tactical” flashlight is an absolute must for clearing your home. We need to go over the actual fine points of this flashlight, and then we need to discuss how to use it to actually increase your effectiveness in your duty.
CHAPTER 57: WHICH FLASHLIGHT TO CHOOSE
First, the flashlight itself. Don’t go cheap on your home defense flashlight. It must be lithium powered. It must contain high-quality lithium batteries. You must have a decent supply of extra batteries on hand. It must have a metal frame; most likely it will be some type of aircraft aluminum. It must have a strong, shatterproof bezel.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 167 And here are the other details that wisdom and experience have proven to me to be musts with regard to the flashlight you keep on hand for clearing your house.
First, it must have an easily operable pressure switch. Some tactical flashlights, and not necessarily even only the cheap or poorly designed ones, have pressure buttons that require a strange amount of force to use.
You’re going to be using that button often, and you do not want to face choosing between a sore thumb or having the light turn off when you need it most, because your thumb is getting numb from holding it down! Preferable are pressure switches that are easily depressed, and that, should you press the button down far enough, will click and lock on.
Second, you want to choose a flashlight that is purposefully designed for close quarters, interior lighting. There are some flashlights
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 168 (such as the SureFire® “scout” line) that are designed to be mounted to rifles, which are very tight, focused beams that allow them to light up targets out to a couple of hundred yards.
These flashlights seem incredible given the amount of light output and distance they achieve, but inside at home, you do not want a beam that tight. The best home defense flashlight will have a tight, round beam that can fully light up a man at a distance of 15 feet from head to toe, and then a very wide cone of slightly less bright light that will light up everything around him. You do not want to have situation where you encounter two threats, and when you shine on one, the other one is out of your beam.
And finally, counterintuitively, you do not want a flashlight that is exceedingly bright. We have determined that anything over 200 lumens is too bright for interior house clearing. TOO bright? How can that be? It is true that a bright tactical flashlight can disorient and temporarily blind an intruder – which is awesome and truly phenomenal. The problem is, if you go too bright, you run the risk of destroying your own night vision every time you turn that thing on.
As you will see once we get into how to actually use the flashlight to clear your house, you will not justbe turning your flashlight on and then walking around and investigating every corner of your house. Instead, you will be turning it on momentarily to check a dark corner, and then switching it right back off again.
If your flashlight is too bright, then when you do this, you will suddenly be dazzled and you will see spots and stars
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 169 every time you move your eyes, anytime you try to look at anything for the next several seconds, and anytime you blink your eyes. You do not want this.
Yes, the dazzling and blinding effect of a super high powered 500 or 800 or 1200lm tactical flashlight is incredible. But experience has taught us that it’s much wiser to let your flashlight be a flashlight, and let your pistol, shotgun, or rifle do the dazzling and blinding.
CHAPTER 58: TACTICAL MOVEMENT INDOORS, WITH A FLASHLIGHT, AND WITH A HANDGUN
So here we are, back to our hypothetical scenario. We’ve given YOU a flashlight. Now that you have practiced moving around your house while utilizing the foundations of tactical movement and the combat crouch, and now that you have practiced doing it with a handgun in your hand, and now that you have practiced rounding (or slicing) corners with that handgun in your hand while reeling it in and out based on how much clearance you have in front of you (and based on what the accuracy needs may be for the room that you were about to enter), we add a new factor into the mix: the flashlight.
Having a flashlight on you changes things only somewhat if you are using a handgun. The flashlight will go in your offhand. You will hold it with a full palm grip so that you don’t drop it, even if you are startled. Other than how you hold your flashlight in relation to your pistol, nothing else about the way that you move throughout your house will change.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 170 CHAPTER 59: THE 2 WAYS TO HOLD YOUR FLASHLIGHT WHILE CLEARING YOUR HOUSE
The first and arguably the best way to hold a flashlight and a pistol at the same time is to cross grip and put the backs of your palms together, so that your off hand (or flashlight hand) fist is on the opposite side of your pistol. See example image below.
Doing so keeps the flashlight oriented with the direction that you are looking and aiming at all times, and it even allows you to fire your handgun much more accurately with one hand than you can without supporting your hand with your flashlight hand.
However, sometimes it makes more sense to get dynamic
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 171 with your flashlight and hold it down below your pistol, or even up above your head.
There could be a lot of different reasons for doing this: sometimes you want to shine in a different direction than where you are pointing your pistol. Other times, you may want to illuminate an area but cannot reach the angle in the traditional pistol and flashlight grip without overexposing yourself.
Or, understanding that flashlights can be “bullet magnets,” you may wish to hold it out away from your body as you move along.
In any case, if you practice clearing your house using both of these methods, you will be able to tap into whichever one provides you with the greatest advantage in the moment when it’s necessary.
CHAPTER 60: HOW AND WHEN TO USE YOUR FLASHLIGHT
As mentioned a moment ago, and in relation to the understanding that you want to retain as much of your
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 172 element of surprise as possible WITHOUT letting the pursuit of said element making you less safe… you do not simply want to switch your flashlight on and then leave it on as you walk around and investigate your house.
Instead, you want to rely on (and preserve) your night vision as much as possible, while staying hidden in shadows whenever you can. To do this, you will want to limit the use of your flashlight to these circumstances:
First, whenever you need it. I say this because I don’t want anything I’m saying to be misinterpreted as advice that you should err on the side of risking NOT seeing a threat. If you need to use your flashlight, use it. But the fact is, most often, we don’t need them.
Most humans have excellent eyes (or at least adequate, when compared to other humans), and if they can see just fine without their flashlights, then they should forgo their use in that moment. (The reason, of course, is because every time you switch that flashlight on, there is a chance your adversaries will be alerted to your presence or your updated locations because of the beam, and they can mount their own “defense” against you.)
In these situations, when you need your flashlight, you should use it as sparingly as possible. Hit a corner with a pulse, and turn it back off as soon as you conclude there is nobody there, for example.
Second, you should use your flashlight as a non-lethal weapon of “suppressive” capabilities when you need to move through illuminated areas. What I mean by this is
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 173 that there will be times when you are working through and clearing your house when you are able to stay in the shadows.
This is ideal, because you will remain invisible to almost everyone outside your home and obscured to most people within it. Let’s say you have to walk down the hallway, and you know that when you are about halfway through, a motion activated nightlight will switch on. Or, let’s say you have to walk in front of a bookshelf that is lit up with some overhead lights 24 hours a day, and there is no switch to turn them off. In either situation, the use of your flashlight while you move will certainly alert the intruder to your presence, without a doubt.
That’s unfortunate, but it’s better than giving them a
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 174 perfect silhouette and view of you as you move adjacent to or toward them. By “covering” yourself with this bright light, all they will see is the bright light itself. And even if they begin shooting at you, they will technically only be guessing. Obviously, it’s not a hard guess! And enough shots in your direction, and they are going to hit you. But before that can happen, they must expose themselves to your flashlight’s beam. This will allow you to see them a lot easier than they can focus on your flashlight beam, and it will allow you to see what they’re doing.
CHAPTER 61: HAVING TWO FLASHLIGHTS
One option you will have available to you is to mount a flashlight on your handgun. If you do this, I would still recommend having an independent flashlight for your off hand. The reason is because of everything we discussed earlier, those reasons why you might need to shine in a different direction than where your pistol is pointing.
Another reason is if you have ever shot a pistol at night with a flashlight mounted on it, you know that things get disorienting for you, the shooter, very fast as that light bounces all around with the recoil of your pistol.
Still another reason is because many rail mounted flashlights are pressure activated and can turn off as soon as you release the pressure. Certainly many of them can be locked on, but they typically are not designed to be used that way. Some designers advocate using your offhand to operate the flashlight mounted to your pistol, but there are many tactical situations where this will be
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 175 impossible or highly disadvantageous to you – where the need to have your offhand connected with the front of your pistol compromises you or makes you inefficient or ineffective with fighting or moving.
For these reasons, again, I recommend having an independent flashlight, in addition to a rail mounted flashlight, if you have one.
All that said, I do like having at least the option of a second flashlight on my pistol. One reason is because sometimes it’s nice to have two flashlights, one being operated by each hand. I’ve cleared my own house countless times with this setup, and I can tell you that I use both flashlights every time.
CHAPTER 62: LASERS
Laser sights are personal preference, but I have never been able to fit them into an efficient and effective home clearing setup in such a way where they have offered me any significant advantage in simulated force-on-force combat.
Most of the reason being, just like a flashlight, you do not want to walk around with your laser turned on, for all the same reasons. By the time you realize that you need to engage a threat, with the distance that is most often involved in close quarters home defense combat, you probably will never even remember seeing your laser
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 176 beam even if you do manage to activate it before or during the fight.
Chalk the use of lasers up to personal preference.
CHAPTER 63: TACTICAL MOVEMENT INDOORS WITH A LONG GUN
What if the weapon you are choosing to use to clear your house is not a handgun? What if it’s a long gun?
This is where building up a true tactical foundation of knowledge and exercising on clearing comes so much in handy. Now that you’ve learned tactical movement, now that you’ve learned to move tactically with a weapon in
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 177 hand, and now that you’ve learned when you do and don’t and should and shouldn’t and how to use a flashlight while cleaning your house, you will find that when you change from holding a flashlight and pistol to holding a long gun, everything already comes completely natural to you.
The differences are these:
First, the extent to which you must reel in your long gun when you round corners.
These weapons are obviously not designed first and foremost for interior, close quarters combat (at least not to the extent that a handgun is), and so adapting them to this role will require a little bit of creativity on your part. It’s not hard, it just requires clever manipulation of the butt stock and barrel. You will end up tucking the butt stock far under your armpit, so that your trigger finger ends up being in line with your armpit.
You will probably end up holding onto the forearm or forward end of the long gun much closer to the barrel
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 178 than you normally would when shooting outdoors (if your hands are not required to manipulate a pump action slide, for example).
Second, it will not be an option, or it will not be a practical option, to hang onto a flashlight independent of the long gun. Therefore, the flashlight must be attached. You will want to make sure that the flashlight can be manipulated and used from several different hand positions on and around the forearm of the long gun.
What I mean is, you will not only want a flashlight that has a pressure button by the flashlight itself, but ideally a flashlight that has both the button on the unit as well as a Velcro or stick on wire based pressure switch that you can mount further back on the forearm. This is by no means mandatory; the only important thing is that you are well- versed in how to use this set up effectively.
If you choose to use a long gun for home
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 179 defense, you will of course want to make sure that you get one that is as short or collapsible as possible. The absolute best option would be a “short barrel” rifle or shotgun with a collapsible butt stock, or even only a pistol grip. This would give you the best of both worlds, in that you have the handling ability and maneuverability of a pistol, but the incredible fire power of a shotgun or rifle. One caveat there is that short barrel shotguns with pistol grip stocks are extremely difficult to control under fire. You can hurt your wrist, and you can lose control of these weapons pretty easily.
CHAPTER 64: THE HIERARCHY OF PROTECTION AND CLEARING: WHAT ORDER DO YOU CLEAR THE ROOMS IN YOUR HOUSE?
Working outward in our chronology, you now come to the point where you have achieved the following:
» You now know how to move tactically.
» You now know how to move tactically while holding a weapon.
» You now know how to maneuver around and handle obstacles that you encounter while moving tactically and while holding a weapon, and while understanding that you may need to shoot something that you find behind any one of these obstacles.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 180 » You now know how to do all of this while also holding a flashlight, and while retaining your night vision.
Essentially, you have all the tactics necessary now to clear your house and to engage in effective home defense. There are only three pieces missing that I still want to cover in this guide.
First, I want to help you to design a strategic map for how you will apply these tactics to your own home. In other words, I want to help you decide how you will clear your house: what rooms you will choose to clear first and why, and how you will proceed and move from there.
Second, I want to discuss how your actions must necessarily change when we move from an “alarm” scenario (one where you merely think they are MIGHT be an intruder in your house after hearing a bump in the night that unsettled you) to a true “danger” scenario when you become certain very early on that an intruder with potentially violent intent is very likely trying to get into your home or is already there.
And lastly, I want to give you some pointers and tips on what you should expect and how you should conduct yourself when you actually come face-to-face with a violent intruder in your house. This discussion will touch on what we have worked hard to cover in hours of our in-home training curriculums designed through my Concealed Carry University.
While we are by no means able to fully cover the important
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 181 intricacies of self-defense – such as armed defense combat, the psychological and mindset factors involved in the mind of a perpetrator, the physiological effects that bullets and gunfire have in the mind of either the good or bad guy, how to move, how to shoot, how to use cover, how to use concealment, where to aim, what to do and what not to do – we will certainly try our hardest here to give you a big leg up over any kind of adversary whom you may face.
But first thing’s first. Let’s look at a strategic map and consider the “hierarchy,” or the “ordering” of how you should go about clearing your house in the event that you think an armed intruder has entered or is trying to enter the premises.
As you already know, your very first step is to identify in real time where your initial reactive defensive point is, based on the exact needs of your household on that particular night or day. And as you already know, your first step within the heat of the moment itself is to get to that initial reactive defensive point.
But from there, where do you go next? Fortunately, this too will all come back to rational thinking and common sense. Basically, to answer this question, we can ask another question:
“If you think a criminal threat is most likely at the extreme opposite end of your house – literally the farthest you could go from where you are standing at your initial reactive defensive point – but if you SUSPECT there may be ANOTHER intruder hiding somewhere along the way… and if you do NOT want to be shot in the back by that
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 182 intruder as you move toward the one farthest from you… how would you have to do things?”
I realize that’s a mouthful, but if you read the question a few times, you understand the genius located within it. Because it’s an exercise that forces you to look at your specific house and its specific floor plan, and it forces you to teach yourself how to move through your house in a way that guarantees that with every step you take, you are – as they say in the military – “clear up to here.”
The main point here is that you never want to run the risk that you turn your back on an intruder who is already in your house. From your initial reactive defensive point, every step you take should put you in a position where you can trust what is behind you.
If you find that you can’t, you have missed something and you need to re-order the protocol that you designed for yourself for when you clear your house.
CHAPTER 65: TACTICAL PROBLEMS
Some fair warning in advance: every single house that you could imagine will have within it several frustrating, excruciating “tactical problems.” These are situations where you have a hard time deciding which of two or even three pathways make the most sense in your hierarchy (or ordering) of clearing.
For example, where there is an open floor plan kitchen that has a floor to ceiling wall in the middle of the house.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 183 On one side, you can walk through the kitchen to the other side of the house. On the other side, there’s a hallway that you can also use to walk to the other side of the house.
And you can imagine, then, that it would be theoretically possible for a threat to a circle you, always staying opposite this wall, as you try to clear both ends of the house.
However, don’t overthink tactical problems like this too much. If you encounter one in the moment without the ability to rehearse ahead of time, maneuver into a defensive position and take that quick pause that we described for the sake of situational awareness and analysis. Make a plan, and then execute it.
If you have the opportunity, you will be able to rehearse and work out these tactical problems for your own home
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 184 floor plan earlier on, so that you will know just what to do and how to do it when it matters most.
CHAPTER 66: SOLVING TACTICAL PROBLEMS
In situations like this one, tactical problems are solved by choosing the pathway that gives you the most options. Here, traveling down a smooth sided hallway that is only 36 inches wide puts you in a bottleneck that you do not want to be in. Instead, taking the path through the kitchen would give you several countertops and bars to use as concealment, and would give you a lot more maneuverability as you pass through them.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 185 The way to handle a situation like this, is to move across the hallway and get a visual, and then clear the kitchen to a defensive point such that you can see roughly the entrance of the hallway at the other end, and then proceed through the kitchen, clearing its angles and moving to the next defensive point.
The bottom line here is that your floor plan in your particular house is so unique that it is up to you to devise the best hierarchy, or ordering, in which you will clear the rooms and areas of your home. But, if you exercise and put to practice your own tactical and strategic knowledge of how all of this best works, I have every bit of confidence that you’ll come up with a plan that will put you miles ahead of the intruder who you may one day face.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 186 CHAPTER 67: THE “DANGER” SCENARIO
If you recall, in the beginning of this guide we outlined two distinct scenarios in which you may be forced to arm yourself for personal protection within your home. One was the “alarm” scenario in which you experienced a “bump in the night” that unsettled you enough to where you knew that, unless you checked it out, you would not be able to get back to sleep, or you would not be doing your job as protector of your home.
The other scenario was what we called a “danger” scenario. The difference being, the degree to which you suspect (or are certain) that an intruder is trying to or has already breached entry into your home.
Most likely, you will be alerted to the potential presence of a threat by some kind of indication such as a noise.
This will kick off your “alarm” response of moving toward your home defense weapon and then tactically moving at the ready to your initial reactive defensive point. But if you begin getting other indications that there may in fact and indeed be a violent intruder while either on your way to your firearm or on your way to your initial reactive defensive point, that is when your protocol that what you do – will begin to change from one scenario to another... from the “alarm” scenario to the “danger” scenario.
First and foremost, this is no longer just your problem.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 187 What I mean by this is: if somebody is in your house without permission, they have broken the law. The law is not yours, and it is not mine. The law is the law, and whether you want to press charges or not, the United States government and the government of the state you live in, and the government of the county you live in do not want citizens within them who feel entitled to enter other people’s homes without permission.
Now obviously, this will always be first and foremost YOUR problem. Because obviously it is easy to create a law, it is much harder to enforce it. It is much harder still to defend oneself from people who for some reason believe themselves to be above the law, like the intruder in your house.
Aside from the practical requirements that are set on your shoulders to defend yourself and those who count on you, it’s important to realize that you are not alone. This is not just your problem. If you call 9-1-1 and report this illegal intrusion of your house, you will find that you have anywhere from 2 to upwards of 12 armed and trained allies racing to your location as fast as they possibly can from the moment they hear of your predicament.
CHAPTER 68: WHY WE DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN DANGER AND ALARM SCENARIOS
In an “alarm” scenario where you only THINK there might be an intruder, if you call 9-1-1, you’re going to burn a lot of bridges fast. Even though it technically would be safer to have the police help you, given that
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 188 most “alarm” scenarios turn out to be unexplainable, you risk not having the police there to help you when you really need them.
That is why I’ve covered everything up to this point in this book: so that you feel confident in clearing your house during times when you know that it is on you to check it out.
It literally “makes the most sense” to clear your own house in a situation that we call an “alarm” scenario.
However, it is completely the opposite in a “danger” scenario. If you realize that there is in fact somebody attempting to breach or already is within your home, it now makes absolutely no sense for you to clear your house unless you have to do so in order to keep your loved-ones safe, or to protect some asset that is as important to you as the life of a loved one.
Even then, you always want to focus on exposing yourself to the absolute minimum amount of danger. So, your goal in this kind of situation will not be to move beyond your loved ones and then set up a point of defense, but instead to move to your loved ones, collect them, and then safely shepherd them into an easily defendable area.
In other words, if you think there is somebody in your house, and you continue getting feedback that there almost certainly is, that is the time to stop clearing your house and to begin retreating insofar as it’s possible. There is no sense in risking a confrontation with this person unless it is absolutely necessary.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 189 That’s what the police are for. They will come in and surround your perimeter, they will light it up, they will have bullet proof vests and much better equipment, and they will deal with this person. When they do, they will discover many of the other locations he has robbed, they will discover accomplices, they will solve and settle cases, they will find peoples’ stolen belongings, and all sorts of other warm and fuzzy outcomes.
Plus, you do not have to suffer the risks of being involved in a gunfight, and you don’t even have to bother with the consequences of winning a gun fight, which in and of themselves are never worth the trouble.
This is where all of your training and exercise up to this point will pay off. Sometimes you do have to move in order to get to a loved one. Other times, you may have to move to protect that critical asset of yours, such as the hypothetical food pantry during a famine.
In any case, now you know how to identify effective defensive positions. You know how to place yourself within them, and you know that it is from the first defensive position that you encounter once you have gathered or accounted for all of your loved ones and move them to a safe point that you can call the police. Alternatively, if you have a spouse or somebody nearby, you can have them move to a safe point and call the police before you even move to gather or protect the other loved ones in the house.
Once you have reported the situation to the police and your loved ones are safe and you are locked into the perfect defensive position, now you play the waiting game – just
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 190 like I did for those four minutes at the top of my stairway as my wife and I awaited the arrival of the police back when my first born son was very young.
CHAPTER 69: WHAT TO SAY TO THE POLICE WHEN YOU NEED TO CALL FOR BACKUP
Whether it’s you or your spouse who calls the police, the report should be as urgent and descriptive as possible. Tell them that you awoke to some strange sounds, and they have continued and that you are reasonably sure (or completely sure, if that’s the case) that there is an intruder in your house.
Be sure to tell them that you or your spouse are armed and that you are barricaded at some point inside your house. Be sure that you tell them what you are wearing, so that police will be able to identify you once they have arrived. Be sure to tell them that you are afraid for your life, and that you request that the police hurry as fast as they possibly can.
Give them any other helpful information you can. If there’s a car in your driveway that doesn’t belong… the description of the individual if you’ve got one… how many intruders you think there are… whether or not you think they are armed. Repeat your address several times, describe to them in detail what your house looks like, and if you think they might drive past or miss for any reason, give them landmarks and other pieces of information they can use.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 191 If it’s your spouse who has called, she/he should feel free to stay on the line with the 9-1-1 dispatcher to help continue to relay information to the police, and also so that you know when to expect the police, provided your spouse can talk in muted and hushed tones.
If it is you who has called, then it’s important that you keep in mind the reality, that you are, at this point, the only viable line of defense that you or your family has. The priority absolutely must be placed on your ability to conduct effective self-defense, rather than entertaining the whims of a 9-1-1 dispatcher.
My suggestion then is that once you have relayed the important information to the police, tell the 9-1-1 dispatcher that you have got to set the phone down so that you can take care of your family.
Keep them on the line, and that way they will have a recording of everything that happens, and then you can continue to pick the phone up every minute or so to ask for an update on how the police are doing and when they will arrive.
I know from experience that once the police arrive, they will want you, as quickly as possible, to disarm and present yourself once the individual in question has been apprehended or dealt with. Absolutely follow every instruction that they give you to the letter. Hopefully you can make vocal contact with the police, but if not, use the 9-1-1 dispatcher to speak through.
Tell them to tell the police that your weapon is put away
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 192 and that you will be coming down the stairs with your hands up in however many seconds. As you come down the stairs, announce your presence in a loud and clear voice. “Officers, I’m the homeowner, I’m coming down! Officers, I am the homeowner, here I come! Can you hear me?”
Just keep in mind that even though the police officers earn their reputation as heroes, exciting calls like these are actually very rare for them, and they will be keyed up. In an effort to avoid getting shot, make sure you follow every instruction, and make sure you announce yourself very clearly.
CHAPTER 70: ARMING YOUR LOVED ONES IN THE MOMENT
One aspect of either “alarm” scenarios or “danger” scenarios that we haven’t discussed yet is what to do with your spouse when you arm yourself and move off to your initial reactive defensive point. This will depend on each individual and each scenario, but if your spouse is like you in their eagerness to accept responsibility for their own safety, it is possible that you will be able to enjoy one of two scenarios:
One where you direct your spouse to arm themselves and set up their own defensive position inside your bedroom, or one where they arm themselves and actually come with you to help you clear the house.
Either scenario is excellent, and the only real concern that
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 193 this results in is the possibility of accidental shootings or “friendly fire” resulting from crossfire.
If your spouse sets up their own defensive point in the bedroom, it’s just important that ahead of time you guys have worked out how to communicate back-and-forth to-and-from each other before you re-enter the doorway. I have not heard of a scenario where one spouse has shot another after the first has cleared a house of a suspected but nonexistent threat, but common sense tells me that it can happen. Especially if the spouse who stays behind in the bedroom is easily excitable.
If your spouse prefers instead to clear the house with you in these situations, all the same rules of house clearing apply, except you can use your heads to consider how clearing your home can be made an even safer task and more effective task when the two of you are working together. I’m sure you have seen videos of police agencies “stacking up” outside of a doorway before breaching it.
These are just some of the potential manifestations of what sort of tactics are possible when you go from having only one to two people, or a team of people.
The sky is truly the limit, and only your creativity will stop the two of you from making a formidable team.
CHAPTER 71: HOW TO FIGHT
Lastly, I want to give a quick overview on some tips for how to actually defend yourself should you come face-
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 194 to-face with a violent intruder or a pair or team of them.
I’ve already given this disclaimer once, but it’s important to understand here that this is NOT EVEN CLOSE to being an attempt at a thorough discussion on how to effectively meet an armed and dangerous attacker in violent combat.
This is a very serious subject, and if you’ve gone this far in this guide then I believe you are the kind of person who would not only understand the fascinating tenets of armed defense, but are truly worthy of them, and who would be able to put them into practice for the greater good of your family and community and yourself.
Simply check out the training material offered through our Concealed Carry University, and you will know exactly what I mean.
For now, let me give you a few basic things to keep in mind:
Avoiding getting shot is more important than shooting your attacker. Keep in mind that your attacker has the goal of making entry into your house, collecting your valuables (or your children) and escaping with them. In order to “win,” they have to achieve these goals. However, in order for you to win, the only goal you have to satisfy is that you survive the encounter.
Simple as that! If somebody breaks in intending to do you harm, and you survive, then you have won. This means that your first priority, should you come in contact with an armed threat, is to avoid being shot. If bullets start
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 195 flying, you need to first move and move to cover. Cover is something that will stop a bullet, and this will be hard to find in a house. In the absence of cover, making yourself a moving target is the best alternative you have. While you are doing that, firing back is the next most important thing to do, and to do it as quickly as you can.
When you fire back at somebody who is shooting at you, you severely cripple their ability to continue firing accurate shots at you. Most likely, they will dive for the nearest cover themselves. When they stop firing at you, you can take advantage of that loss of initiative that they’ve just experienced (as we describe it) and you can zero in on their location or their body and begin peppering it with your own fire. Keep the hammer on until you believe you scored enough critical hits to put them out of the fight.
Armed defense engagements are short and violent. Keep in mind that you will almost certainly not be entering into a protracted gun fight within your home. Most use of force scenarios are statistically over and done within three seconds of the time that the first shot is fired. This is why we call our gun fight analysis and combat dynamics education and training video series: “3 SECONDS FROM NOW.” After three seconds have passed, statistically, the engagement will be over, and you will have either won or lost.
Therefore, you can forget the need to carry lots of ammunition with you when you clear your house. I would not want to do this job with anything less than 10 rounds of ammunition, and my personal preference is 30. But I can almost guarantee that anything beyond 10 or 12 rounds will be unnecessary in all but the most unthinkable and outrageous situations. Most likely, one
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 196 or two or three shots will be exchanged.
Armed defense ends when somebody decides it’s over. One of the most counterintuitive truths that we have uncovered through our “3 SECONDS FROM NOW” training series is that in 95% of armed engagements involving private citizens (in other words, a good guy and a criminal), the situation resolves NOT when one of the parties becomes destroyed and incapacitated – but instead, when one of the parties chooses to disengage.
This is a very hard truth for most people to accept because it doesn’t make sense on the surface. But the fact is, even when somebody is shot, in the vast majority of those times, that person could continue to fight if they chose to. Obviously, if they are hit in the head or the spine, that is not a choice that they can make. In that case, they fit into that 5% minority category where the situation ended because one of the two parties was physically “shut off.”
However, headshots and spine shots are extraordinarily rare in armed defense combat. In fact, it is rare to score any critical hit, or any hit at all. Gun fights tend to be chaotic and fast-paced affairs and you likely will not know whether you hit your attacker or not until he checks himself into a hospital later that night. Still, it’s important to understand that even in a situation where your attacker died in your front yard while trying to run away, it was a decision they made to spend their last six seconds of life trying to run away instead of using those last six seconds to continue trying to attack you.
Here’s why this counterintuitive truth matters so much to you: because your goal for achieving effective home-
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 197 defense is not necessarily to shoot your attacker to the point where they can no longer physically attack. Fortunately for you, your job is much, much easier than that.
You only have to push them to the point where sticking around inside your house is no longer worth it from a value proposition standpoint. Again, all you have to do is force them to disengage. The way to do that is to simply expose them to more risk and danger than they bargained for when they kicked off with their plan to invade your home and victimize your family.
The best way to do that of course is with effective armed defense. And what that looks like, is being the first one to fire a shot when possible, and to continue firing at them until they have fled the area. And the other golden nugget of wisdom and tactical brilliance buried within this counterintuitive truth is that the act of shooting at your threat is actually more effective for causing them to disengage and flee the scene than scoring actual hits on target is.
Obviously, much better if you can do both: fire at them and score critical hits. But we know from having analyzed over 2,000 use of force incidents that simply firing at them is more effective than waiting for a good shot. Do not give them the opportunity. Do not give them a lull. Strike hard and continue striking until they are either down on the ground or they are running away and are no longer a threat to you.
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 198 CONCLUSION
My friends, it has been fantastic to have you with me in this education and training guide. Only God knows what is in store for our country, right now, or in the future. Similarly, nobody knows what is in store for your household, but it pleases me greatly that now our nation has one more guardian in it – YOU – who is now far more capable of defending your home, your castle. Put everything you learned in this guide to practice, and your family will be better for it. You’ll sleep better at night.
And if you stick with this guardian mission and lifestyle and apply it to every aspect of your life, I can promise you that you will never regret the investment that you’re making for yourself in this way.
Thank you so much for joining me, and stay safe
Patrick Kilchermann
HOME DEFENSE | PATRICK KILCHERMANN | 199