A Reddit user said the closest he ever came to actually using his gun happened while he was outside a friend’s house, in what should have been a completely ordinary moment. According to his comment in the thread, he was standing there for less than a couple of minutes when he heard footsteps coming from the backyard next door. What made that stand out immediately was that the property beside them was abandoned. In his mind, nobody should have been back there at all.
He wrote that the next sound was the fence creaking. Then he saw two hands come up over the top like someone was about to climb over into the yard. From the way he told it, that was the whole trigger point. He was not trying to guess whether somebody was lost, cutting through, or just messing around. He had an abandoned property on one side, unexpected footsteps in the backyard, the fence starting to move, and then a pair of hands appearing over the top like whoever was there had already decided to come across.
That was when he reacted. He said he drew the flashlight he usually carried in his pocket, pointed it toward the hands, and shouted, “I have a gun, it’s loaded, and I will shoot you.” He even added afterward that he probably sounded shaky when he said it, joking that he likely “sounded like a bitch,” but it worked. According to his account, the person on the other side got down off the fence and took off in the opposite direction. The whole thing ended right there, before he had to draw the gun itself.
What makes the story memorable is how little buildup there was. He was not walking through some notorious area late at night. He was not already locked into a confrontation. He was just outside a friend’s place when a neighboring abandoned yard suddenly stopped being empty, the fence started moving, and someone was apparently on the verge of climbing over. He went from standing there casually to warning somebody off with the possibility of deadly force in just a few seconds.
The story he told was simple and tense. He heard footsteps where nobody should have been, saw hands rise over a fence from an abandoned property, drew his flashlight, and warned the person that he was armed and would shoot if they came over. Whoever was there immediately backed off and ran. No gun came out, no shots were fired, and that was enough to end it.
What do you think — if you saw two hands come up over a fence from an abandoned yard next door, would a warning like his feel like enough, or would you already have the gun coming out too?
Original Reddit post: When was the closest time you’ve come to drawing?
