OSD 323: Home defense is an unsolved problem
Guns are the worst option for home defense, except for everything else.
All advice about using a gun for home defense centers around a troublesome fact: shooting somebody is a disaster. The only thing worse than shooting someone in your home is being shot yourself, which is why we have guns as a backstop. But here’s the scenario:
It’s 3 a.m. and you wake up to a strange sound from the kitchen. It takes you 5-10 seconds to be sure the sound is real and not just residual sound from a dream.
Ten seconds later, the noise is in the hallway. Sounds like a person.
Five seconds later, you see a stranger in the hall.
Now you have a split-second decision to make: do you shoot the stranger?
The reality, of course, is that if you are in the position of needing to make that split-second decision, you messed up a long time ago. Home defense advice focuses on putting you into a position where you have many leisurely minutes to make that decision, or to prevent yourself from needing to make it at all by deterring intruders. Concentric rings of security, making your home a hard target, door hardware that makes it take a few minutes to kick your door in, etc. And all of that is great. The vast majority of home defense situations don’t involve a successful break-in, let alone gunfire.
What if all of that fails? The final option is a gun. But think about what that means: if somebody does successfully break into your house, with current technology the best option is, “You get five seconds to make the most consequential decision of your entire life.”
There are four problems with shooting somebody:
The moral weight of taking a life
The risk of shooting the wrong person (mistaken identity and/or hitting bystanders)
The physical danger that the intruder will shoot back or otherwise hurt you
The potential for criminal or civil litigation afterwards
Guns are pretty bad on all four. In the extreme case where your life is at risk, it’s of course better to eat those problems than to be dead. And there will always be such cases, so guns will always be the final backstop. But over time, technology can give you more options to use before going to that final backstop. Even after someone has broken into your home, “how do you effectively stop them with zero moral/physical/legal risk to yourself?” is just a technology problem.
We’ve talked to several founders working on different aspects of this. It’s an exciting space. If you’re working on it, we’d love to talk to you too.
This week’s links
Lead poisoning and firearms
Good video from JaredAF:
See also this vintage black-background-Garand-Thumb video on the same topic:
Kostas Moros on the federal government not appealing Range v. US to the Supreme Court
This means the Third Circuit’s decision will stand, exempting a narrow set of non-violent felons in the Third Circuit (Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) from the lifetime prohibition on gun possession.
The citizen forced reset trigger use case
Breakdown from Brass Facts on what FRTs are and aren’t good for.
Latest OSD podcast: Tim from Hoffman Tactical
Tim is very driven and is a clear thinker, and it was really interesting to hear him lay out his thoughts. Use these links to listen on your platform of choice:
“Venture capital for gun companies?” Check us out on The Reload podcast with Stephen Gutowski
Stephen really gets it.
Check us out on the Gun Talk Media podcast too
We had a good time with Ryan Gersham discussing the gun industry and what we're seeing in civilian defense startups. The interview is titled "A Tech-Forward Approach to Gun Rights", and that's an apt summary.
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One of the biggest problems with home defense is the utter lack of defensive qualities in our architecture. Walls, fences, lights, doors one cannot simply kick in, windows that are nigh unbreakable…all these are missing from most homes.
Start with improving your perimeter defenses starting with the property line. If you make it hard to get in, you may never have to reach for a permanent solution.
"Left of Bang" is good policy.