I was looking at the videos of home invasions that were posted yesterday and started thinking about a couple of related topics.
Let's talk about numbers. Sometime over the last couple of years I came across an article that stated roughly half of all police shootings are against multiple bad guys. Interesting stuff, but I'm not a cop.
I wondered how many home invasions are committed by more than one criminal, but couldn't find any statistics. About a year (?) was spent saving every article that I ran across regarding home invasions. Eventually the articles were counted up and around 50% of them delt with multiple invaders. That was interesting, but not very scientific since bad news receives more national coverage. Three bad guys breaking into a home gets more coverage than a single criminal kicking in a door and robbing someone. It is what it is and I'd love to see some stats if any of you find them. Even if my little study was not scientific, it was still clear to me that a great many home invasions are committed by more than one criminal.
In the interest of brevity, let's make the assumption that there is a good chance that you'll face more than one home invader if your house is broken into.
The FBI moved back to 9mm handguns after a multi million dollar study regarding "Stopping Power." I won't go into great detail about what they found, but it was reported that police officers only hit the bad guy about 20% of the time. This is old news and had already been reported in earlier studies over the years.
The question is often asked, "Why do you need a high capacity magazine?"
Alright then, let's talk about it. The anti gunners like to preach that only the police and military should have guns because of the vast training that they receive. If the police, with all of their supposed expertise, only get hits 20% of the time then how accurate are you going to be if your door is kicked in at 1am?
In theory, you're only going to get hits 2 out of 10 times. If you have 2 or 3 home invaders then odds are that a 5 shot snubbie or even a M1911 may not be enough. In theory.
So why wouldn't you want 15, 17 or even 19 rounds on board when defending yourself?
But you can always carry a reload or two, right? Yep, you certainly can.
If you look at the videos posted earlier you'll see that the homeowners are wearing either sleep clothes or shorts. They are also running and moving quickly throughout the house. It would be very easy to drop a spare magazine that was tucked into the waistband of a pair of sweats or sleepwear. It looks like one homeowner in the video almost lost his shorts when wrestling with a criminal.
Yes, you can carry a reload. You may find your spare magazine bouncing down the staircase as you descend in a hurry.
It seems to me that the best solution is to keep a high capacity semi automatic for home defense. I would prefer to call them "Normal Capacity" semi autos, but the "High Capacity" phrase is unfortunately common across America at this time.
To summarize:
There's a chance that a home invasion may consist of multiple bad guys.
You probably won't get hits 100% of the time if you do have to defend yourself. If your shooting is as good as the "Professionals" then you'll only hit the target 20% of the time. There is no guarantee that hitting the target once means that the threat is stopped.
A reload should be grabbed when you pick up your self defense firearm if there's time. There is no guarantee that you'll hang onto the reload or even have time to use it in the middle of an encounter.
IMO, it's better to start off with a high capacity semi automatic and carry a reload if possible.
But as always, to each his own. I'm just a faceless guy at a keyboard.
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