Scripting Your Attack

I’ll have more about this for another website in the near future, but I was cleaning up my office today and I found a stash of tactical flashlights which I had gathered over the years. I have a lot of flashlights, easily two dozen. I’ve been obsessed with portable candlepower since my days of carrying around a 2xAA MagLite thirty years ago (Six! Count ’em, six lumens!). As a result, I almost always have one with me.

However, I am not the only person living in my home, and the other people under my roof don’t carry flashlights with them. Or pepper spray. Or a firearm. They are all familiar with our safe room and know what do do if there is a home invasion, but what do we do if there is a disturbance, inside or outside our home, which requires our attention but hasn’t escalated to the point to the point of lethal force?

Now right now, a lot of you are saying either “That would never happen to me,” or “I’d ignore it. Not my circus, not my monkeys,” and I get that. However, are telling me you would never intervene if you saw an aggressive dog (not yours) attacking someone on the sidewalk outside your home? Are you telling me that you’ve never been to a party where a friend of a friend had a little too much to drink and a fight broke out?

Think that scenario won’t happen inside of your home, ever?

I realized that I had scripted out my home defense plan. I knew that the only home defense scenario I would have to worry about was the middle-of-the-night home invasion. What I failed to take into account was that I might, by accident, let the bad guy in via the front door, or that something outside on my property might require a less-than-lethal response. I had scripted out my home defense plan so tightly, I left no room for a flexible response.

Whoops.

So now, there is a small decorative box right by the front door. It’s within easy arm’s reach of someone opening the door and it’s easy to access with one hand. Inside of it are a mid-sized can of pepper spray and a tactical flashlight with enough oomph to distract a potential attacker. I strongly believe in having a flexible response to the threat of violence on the street, and now I have a flexible response to the threat of non-lethal violence inside or near my home.