Pyro01
Regular Member
Wife unprepared for home/self defense
So, with all the rain we've been having lately, it's been getting humid in our house. We live below ground in half a house and so even though we keep the dehumidifier running, we still found some mold growing in our spare bedroom closet. I sent out an email to the rental office on Saturday, and they responded back to me at 9:42 AM this morning via email saying they'd have someone over today to take care of it. By the time I got to work at 10AM, sat down for 5 minutes and checked my email on my phone, and saw that message, and forwarded the email to my wife, my boss came up and asked if I saw another email and had a chance to read it. I said I'd get on it, and soon after I took care of the task about 3 minutes after my boss came to talk to me, I received a phone call from my wife.
She said when she came out of the bathroom this morning she saw the stairwell lights(the stairwell that leads to outside, 2 locked doors) on, thought it was odd. She came out and was getting ready to sit down and eat, she walks over to the stairwell light switch to turn off the light, and as she was halfway through the living room, the maintenance guys pops out of the spare bedroom and scares my wife. He explains that he sprayed the walls for the mold and that we should keep the dehumidifier running. I'm not sure if anything else was said, but he walks back out of our house and then she calls me and tells me what happened.
She couldn't have been more than 15 feet from the guy and if he had been an intruder who had picked the door locks or smashed the glass real quietly to get in, she would not have been able to run into the bedroom in time to grab the shotgun loaded with buckshot. I had taken my Taurus .45 with me as I usually do, and the only other gun that I would leave loaded would have been my S&W 460 mag.(with 45 colt ammo for HD), but I had put that away because we babysitted over the weekend and I didn't want the kid to find it, he's only about 4 years old.
Anyways, I probably wouldn't have called her until the afternoon to see how her day was going, and it just really worries me that something really bad could have happened to her. She is trained on how to handle firearms safely because her dads really into firearms and she grew up deer hunting for 6 years. However, for those who don't already know, she hates open/concealed carry and people other than police carrying guns for self-defense. She's fine with me keeping a loaded shotgun in the house, but god forbid if I ever asked her to carry a gun. She doesn't even like it when I do it, so I usually don't but a loaded gun is never far from me.
She's deluded into thinking our house can't easily be broken into because there's two locked doors in our main stairwell. We have a rear stairwell whose outside door we keep locked and the inside door unlocked in case we have to ask our friends living upstairs to take care of our dog during the day. Then we also have 4 large window wells that can be climbed down into, which also serve as fire escapes. We leave the windows closed and locked unless we're home and the weather is nice and cool out. I'm definitely going to have to re-evaluate our security especially since I know my wife came this close to potential harm had it been anyone other than that maintenance man. Granted he had house keys, but there are other ways of entering a house silently...
Oh, one final thought, she thinks her semester of self-defense she learned at college is enough to protect her, but I think that situation only applies when she is able to run away, you can't do that easily in our house. Even then, if it were someone about my size(6'3" 225 lbs, strong), she'd have an extremely hard time being able to do so, let alone get to the shotgun in time.
I guess what I want to know from you guys, other than ways to make my house more secure, ways to make her more aware of her surroundings and increasing her survivability.
So, with all the rain we've been having lately, it's been getting humid in our house. We live below ground in half a house and so even though we keep the dehumidifier running, we still found some mold growing in our spare bedroom closet. I sent out an email to the rental office on Saturday, and they responded back to me at 9:42 AM this morning via email saying they'd have someone over today to take care of it. By the time I got to work at 10AM, sat down for 5 minutes and checked my email on my phone, and saw that message, and forwarded the email to my wife, my boss came up and asked if I saw another email and had a chance to read it. I said I'd get on it, and soon after I took care of the task about 3 minutes after my boss came to talk to me, I received a phone call from my wife.
She said when she came out of the bathroom this morning she saw the stairwell lights(the stairwell that leads to outside, 2 locked doors) on, thought it was odd. She came out and was getting ready to sit down and eat, she walks over to the stairwell light switch to turn off the light, and as she was halfway through the living room, the maintenance guys pops out of the spare bedroom and scares my wife. He explains that he sprayed the walls for the mold and that we should keep the dehumidifier running. I'm not sure if anything else was said, but he walks back out of our house and then she calls me and tells me what happened.
She couldn't have been more than 15 feet from the guy and if he had been an intruder who had picked the door locks or smashed the glass real quietly to get in, she would not have been able to run into the bedroom in time to grab the shotgun loaded with buckshot. I had taken my Taurus .45 with me as I usually do, and the only other gun that I would leave loaded would have been my S&W 460 mag.(with 45 colt ammo for HD), but I had put that away because we babysitted over the weekend and I didn't want the kid to find it, he's only about 4 years old.
Anyways, I probably wouldn't have called her until the afternoon to see how her day was going, and it just really worries me that something really bad could have happened to her. She is trained on how to handle firearms safely because her dads really into firearms and she grew up deer hunting for 6 years. However, for those who don't already know, she hates open/concealed carry and people other than police carrying guns for self-defense. She's fine with me keeping a loaded shotgun in the house, but god forbid if I ever asked her to carry a gun. She doesn't even like it when I do it, so I usually don't but a loaded gun is never far from me.
She's deluded into thinking our house can't easily be broken into because there's two locked doors in our main stairwell. We have a rear stairwell whose outside door we keep locked and the inside door unlocked in case we have to ask our friends living upstairs to take care of our dog during the day. Then we also have 4 large window wells that can be climbed down into, which also serve as fire escapes. We leave the windows closed and locked unless we're home and the weather is nice and cool out. I'm definitely going to have to re-evaluate our security especially since I know my wife came this close to potential harm had it been anyone other than that maintenance man. Granted he had house keys, but there are other ways of entering a house silently...
Oh, one final thought, she thinks her semester of self-defense she learned at college is enough to protect her, but I think that situation only applies when she is able to run away, you can't do that easily in our house. Even then, if it were someone about my size(6'3" 225 lbs, strong), she'd have an extremely hard time being able to do so, let alone get to the shotgun in time.
I guess what I want to know from you guys, other than ways to make my house more secure, ways to make her more aware of her surroundings and increasing her survivability.
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