HOME DEFENSE – PART 1

The Home defense with a firearm is perhaps one of the most complex and at the same time most underestimated applications in the field of firearm defense.

About home defense I have really read all kinds of things, from the most sensible and serious to the most stupid and improbable ones.

The main mistake that is also what normally tends to make this application underestimate is given by two common but wrong evaluations:

1) The fact that being our home, we believe we have full knowledge of the space and absolute control of it.

2) We believe that point one is a huge advantage over any kind of threat coming from the external environment.

Unfortunately things are not like this and if there is an objective advantage in the knowledge of the environment (our home) this will not be during a critical event( only in little part ), but it can possibly be so only if careful work has been done upstream. planning.

The second part of the error consists in considering a possible threat only in the external-internal relationship and not also in the internal-internal relationship which is the most complex condition.

Let’s try to understand better when we talk about Housing Defense what we are talking about

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As for everything else, even for the Home Defense we can’t have a general standard as there are a series of fundamental variables that make this application extremely fragmented, vast and diversified.

The first macro dynamic that we will have to evaluate, as it constitutes one of the essential variables is the structural one.

This is an extremely important variable and in the meantime it originates from the type of macro environment or context we are talking about. For example, if we compare the average tipology of houses in the United States, the structural characteristics of the same are profoundly different from those in Europe, this from the point of view of materials and from an architectural point of view.

I define this as an indirect variable, as it is the context that defines some of the general characteristics regardless of the choices we are going to make.

However, in both macro environments/contexts, there are also a series of structural variables, such as the type of house, or if we are talking about a single and isolated house, a villa with a garden, an apartment, a country house or an apartment inserted in a condominium, in a building or in a skyscraper.

All these are direct variables as they respond to choices made and directly define the structural typology of the housing unit itself.

The structural housing diversity is one of those dynamics that most influences (or should) in the choice of the defensive strategy and can also influence the choice of the type of firearm.

The second macro dynamic that we have to analyze is the micro context, that is the restricted territorial context and the morphology of the territory in which the house is located.

There are normally some parameters that must be taken into account in order to evaluate this macro.

The first is the type of population density of the area in which our home is located, this parameter I usually divide into

5 different levels:

1) Isolated (e.g. rural context, wooded area, mountain context)

2) Low Density (residential or industrial areas)

3) Medium Density (small villages, towns, counties)

4) High Density (city, metropolis)

5) Critical Density (megacities, favelas, shanty towns)

The housing density is usually directly proportional to the density of the population in that specific geographical area.

This is a parameter that we must take into consideration because it determines the risk of collateral damage, in fact the greater the housing density, the lower the distance between the houses, the greater the number of residents, the greater the risk of indirect collateral damage.

This macro dynamic influences the choice of the type of firearm, caliber and and the type of ammunition .

This is the third macro dynamic that we are going to analyze.

As for the other two previous ones, also in this case we have legal conditions and autonomies that can be totally different from each other depending on the country of reference.

The home defense is essentially an application of legitimate defense, a right that is normally regulated everywhere, by laws that can be different and that as such generate different autonomies, but which are basically all based on the same principle, that of being able to defend oneself from the attempt implemented by someone else to deprive us of our fundamental right which is life.

That said, this macro combined with the first two is fundamental to define the defensive strategy and this too can influence the choice of the type of firearm in our application.

To be clearer, the legal autonomies that a citizen has in the USA are different from those that a citizen has in most of Europe, but there can also be regulatory differences between one US State and another in terms of autonomy with firearms and the consequent home defense dynamics.

For general information, the main differences between the USA and Europe in terms of legal autonomy in home defense, originate not so much around the firearm laws but within the concept of private property and the type of laws on the matter, one day maybe we will discuss this point in greater depth.

So this macro basically suggests what autonomy we have and what we must maintain in our defensive strategy in order not to commit, during our defensive actions, a more serious crime than the one we are defending ourselves for.

This is the fourth and last macro dynamic before entering the direct strategic part.

Here too we must consider that the criminal dynamics that we face can be extremely different from place to place, not only at the macro-context (Country level ), but also at the micro-context level. I try to explain it better, the criminal dynamics with which a citizen of Johannesburg must confront are profoundly different from those which a citizen of London, Florence or San Antonio Texas he will have to confront.

At the same time, however, we can have different dynamics even within the micro context, a Chicago citizen living in the Austin or Englewood neighborhood will have to face different criminal dynamics from those who live on the North Side such as Lincoln Square or Roscoe Village.

In South Africa as in many areas of South America for example, in terms of home defense, one of the most complex dynamics that citizens have to face is the fact that often it is not a question of thefts, but of real armed assaults , from part of criminal gangs or armed groups that attack homes, villas and farms with extreme violence, assault rifles and even jammers .

This macro absolutely determines the defensive strategy to be applied and in part also the type of firearm, caliber and type of ammunition.