OSD 321: Lessons from the Amouranth home invasion video
A couple weeks ago, Colion Noir did a detailed breakdown of the home invasion suffered by Amouranth (a popular Twitch streamer and OnlyFans model) and her husband Nick Lee. Colion went to their house and they walked him through what happened, as shown in home security camera footage. Here’s the video:
The high-level summary of events is:
Just before 11pm, three armed robbers pry through a wooden fence and come onto the property, seeking $20 million in bitcoin that Amouranth had tweeted about having.
They eventually get to Amouranth’s locked bedroom door. There are some edits in the security camera footage, so it’s hard to get a definitive sense of elapsed time. But in the video this is 40 seconds after they got onto the property.
They shoot at the lock and then kick the door in, entering the bedroom and beating Amouranth with a pistol. In the video, this is 70 seconds after they got onto the property. In real life it may have been slightly longer, accounting for the edits in the footage.
Amouranth leads them to the detached garage/office building, where Nick is up late. She had called him when she first heard the commotion of the robbers entering the house, and he had heard everything play out over the phone.
As they round the corner to follow Amouranth up the stairs to the office, Nick (who was waiting at the top of the stairs) fires a pistol, hitting one of the robbers. The robbers all immediately flee. Police later found a .22LR shell casing on the ground, and Nick says he has never owned a .22, so one of the robbers likely got off a panicked shot but didn’t hit anyone. Nick slipped on his plate carrier just before the robbers got to his building, so he had some protection in case they had hit him.
From the time the robbers entered the property to the time they fled was 4 minutes and 35 seconds.
You should watch the full video for all the details. Here are the lessons that jumped out from a home defense standpoint:
The robbers were amateurs. Fortunately, this will be the case for almost all robbers, even before bullets start flying*. At 0:41 in the video, one of the robbers gets cold feet, and he and the apparent ringleader spend 15 seconds arguing outside the locked bedroom door about whether they should actually go through with the robbery. Even apart from technical skill, it’s common to see wide variations in mindset and willingness across people, both among robbers and among their targets. Amouranth and Nick both showed very impressive mindsets that may have saved their lives.
*After bullets start flying, everybody is an amateur. There are many cases of even highly trained police devolving completely (doing things like firing blindly through walls) once bullets start coming back at them.
Familiarity with the environment matters. The robbers spent their first 30 seconds on the property loudly fumbling through a messy garage, dogs barking the whole time. Then they discovered that garage wasn’t even attached to the main house. Then they spent probably another 30 seconds loudly trying to get through the locked bedroom door. Then Amouranth led them right into a trap. You can navigate your house in the dark, and that’s a big advantage over somebody who has never been there.
Dogs help. The dogs started barking as soon as the guys entered the property. Your dog knows what kinds of sounds are and aren’t normal, and you know your dog’s different barks. Alarm systems are great too, but they don’t replace the nuance and early detection that a dog gives you.
Speaking of early detection…. This is the biggest takeaway. If you woke up from a dead sleep with three armed robbers standing over your bed, you’d need to be very clever and lucky to regain the upper hand. But if you have several minutes of heads up and can gain good situational awareness, those same robbers will never make it past the threshold of your room. In the middle of the night, the judgment calls get hard. Amouranth and Nick have been SWATed repeatedly. What if the people at the door are police? What if it’s a friend playing a weird joke? What if the noise downstairs was a local drunk stumbling into the wrong house? The earlier your detection and the better your situational awareness tools (in this case: cameras, dogs, communication with others on the property), the better you’re going to be equipped to make good decisions.
Move toward your outs. Being beaten by three robbers in her bedroom, Amouranth couldn’t solve the situation in one step. But she could make incremental progress toward her outs. The outbuilding had (a) her husband, (b) a panic room, (c) a change of environment to give her more variables to work with. When she started leading the robbers there, she didn’t know which of those was going to work out. For example, she thought of going to the panic room but realized they were too close behind her for that to work. But at each step, she made whatever incremental moves she could to get closer to her outs.
Think about how you can optimize your own home defense lessons based on this. What could you change to get yourself an extra 30 seconds of early warning? How can you quickly and safely gain situational awareness in the middle of the night? What are your outs?
It’s rare to get such a detailed look at how one of these situations plays out in real life. Let’s learn from it.
This week’s links
Jillian Shriner, author and wife of Weezer’s bassist, shot by police after apparently firing her own gun
Really weird case. It’ll be interesting to see the full story. For now what has come out is:
Police were chasing three guys who were in a hit-and-run.
The suspects abandoned their vehicle and fled on foot into a neighborhood.
They chased one of the guys into Shriner’s backyard.
Shriner was there with a gun.
Shriner fired her gun and police shot her in the shoulder. The order of those events is not clear.
They arrested her and charged her with attempted murder 🤔
Colorado governor signs semi-auto permit-to-purchase scheme into law
Until recently, all states with assault weapon bans had had those bans in place (and had periodically tightened them) since the early ‘90s. No state had gone from no-ban to ban in decades. That changed recently, with Delaware’s 2022 ban, Washington’s 2023 ban, and now this ban-lite in Colorado.
It will soon be much harder for Colorado gun owners to continue purchasing modern semi-automatic firearms.
In a closely guarded ceremony Thursday, Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D.) signed SB25-003 into law. The “Semiautomatic Firearms & Rapid-Fire Devices” bill criminalizes the manufacture, distribution, transfer, and purchase of any semi-automatic rifle, shotgun, or gas-operated handgun that accepts a detachable magazine. The law also carves out an exception from the ban for those who undergo an extensive permitting and training process — the first of its kind for purchasing firearms in Colorado.
The Chinese robber fallacy
2015 Slate Star Codex piece. Consider how it applies to media coverage of gun ownership.
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I don't think these people did as well as you do. They have a ton of purchased "security" - high wall, security cams, alarm, a safe room, obstacles in the form of their hoarding tendencies, etc. yet at the end of the day were caught unawares in their own home w/ no early warning (am I understanding correctly they got in through an unlocked door?). They were targeted to begin with because of all the bling and complete lack of operational security. This could have gone very badly and it is largely dumb luck that it didn't.
Security isn't something you can buy at a store. To me this is a video of how NOT to handle personal security starting by advertising yourself as a target and thinking that your cameras and your wall and your safe room are going to protect you when you can't even trouble yourself to lock the doors. It is not that hard to make a typical residence hardened enough that breaking in buys you enough time to realize something is happening and respond, and I'm talking about regular people with regular budgets.
I’ve argued this fallacy under other names for years now re: guns, crime, immigration, and half a dozen other issues. And while I rarely make “X Tech causes Y Harm” arguments, I would argue it’s more prevalent than ever because of the internet.
That’s because it’s easier than ever to find SOMEONE in the broad community of the (?billions?) users online in support of your argument, whether positive or negative. Think of every “fan backlash” article you’ve ever read. Did you know that “people” hated the Ghostbusters reboot and were blasting the cast with misogyny and hate? I mean, look what NutBuster420-69 said on Twitter!
Ok, but…is NutBuster420-69 really a representative and significant sample of public opinion? Or were you looking for examples of shitty people who hate women-lead movies, and found them? Because I can find half a dozen extremists and/or idiots on the internet to support any idea, no matter how crazy.
Conversely, I’d argue it’s part of what drives all the hullabaloo about conspiracy theories, “misinformation,” and “hate”. Put simply, no matter how weird, how crazy, or how reprehensible your idea is…you can find a bunch of people on the internet willing to agree with you and affirm you. Not because there really are large swaths of the world’s population who believe in lizard people (or whatever), but because even 0.0001% of 346,790,860 Americans means there are 34,679 people in the USA alone who share your belief.
My theory - and I’ll freely admit it’s just a theory, I can’t back it up with any real research - is that 50 years ago, if you’re growing up in a farm town in Ohio and you told your friend you think a cabal run cooperatively by the lizard people and the Jews had a space laser they use to threaten the US government into submission, one of your friends or neighbors would look at you like you’re insane, tell you to calm the hell down, and you’d probably shut up about it and move on. Today, you’ll jump online and find at least >10,000 other people who’ll tell you that you’re absolutely right and the only reason no one is talking about it is because (obviously!) they’re just scared of the space laser.
I think of it as Crazy Rule 34: The internet has groups about it. No exceptions.