I’m astounded at the number of people who don’t carry a gun in their house. Why wouldn’t you? OK, I thought of Three Reasons Not to Home Carry. But that post was heavy on the irony, light on the WTF. But c’mon. WTF? It’s not like the gun’s gonna do anything. It’s just there. On your hip or in your pocket. Ready should you need it. Will you need it? I certainly hope not. But if you do need it, why, there it is. Here’s an example of a man who had plenty of guns in the house but couldn’t get to any of them when push came to shove. In fact, he did a lot of stupid things, but let’s focus on his home carry deficit first . . .
[David] Whalen [above] said he and his partner of 10 years, Ava Smith, were sitting on the couch just after 8 p.m. on Tuesday. She got up to go to the bathroom and there was knocking at the back door.
Then, two masked men kicked in the door.
“It happened really quickly,” Whalen recounted.
“They came in through the door same as a football team, charging in.”
Whalen said the one of the intruders had a handgun and the other had a knife with a brass-knuckle handle.
They started punching the 63-year-old man and he said they threatened to shoot him. Whalen fought back and one of their weapons cut him open near his eye.
As the pair subdued Whalen and used duct tape to tape his wrists, ankles and mouth, Smith came out of the bathroom.
“They choked her in the other room and dragged her in and put her on the floor and taped her up,” he said.
“Then they came back a second time and retaped her again.”
Yeah I had to read that twice too. I thought they “raped” her again. But the cbc.ca report is clear: the criminals were after Whalen’s guns. They knew about the firearms. That’s STFU Mistake Number 1.
Whalen says he would have shot the bad guys if not for his partner’s presence. Really? I don’t see how Mr. Whalen could have accessed his long guns (remember this is Canada) given the speed, surprise and violence unleashed by the invaders. Or the fact that an unsecured gun in Canada can get you thrown in jail—even if you were defending yourself.
Whalen also told cbc that next time he’ll shoot the perps through the door. That’s STFU Mistake Number 2 and a dodgy strategy on all sorts of levels. His guilt at his partner’s emotional distress goes to show you that sometimes it’s better to have fought and lost than to have never fought at all.
Really. Be that as it may, here’s the bottom line: Whalen was defenseless in his own home against attackers wielding deadly weapons, despite the fact that the Canadian home owner had plenty of deadly weapons at his disposal. If he’d been home carrying the outcome of this home invasion could have been very different.
[Keeping in mind that the outcome could have been very different even though he wasn’t able to defend himself with a firearm. In other words, I’ve got two words for gun grabbers’ argument that not having a gun keeps violence from “escalating” in a home invasion: Petit family.]
We can debate the odds of a home invasion happening to you, or your loved ones. We can talk about the dangers of keeping a gun on your person around the house (and the advantages in terms of normalizing guns for your children). But at the end of the proverbial day, when seconds count, you don’t want your gun to be minutes away. If worst comes to worst, you are not going to win a footrace to your gun. Period.
Do the right thing. Either strap a gun to your hip or get a smaller gun and carry it in a pocket holster. Why not? Oh and don’t live in Canada.