A Reddit user said the first time he ever had to draw on another person happened while he was living in an apartment and home by himself. According to his comment in the thread, his wife was at school and it was around 8:30 or 9 p.m. when he heard a loud bang at the back door. It was not one of those little noises people can talk themselves out of. He said it was loud enough that he knew right away somebody was at the door with force behind it.
He wrote that he went to the peephole to check and saw someone kick the door a second time. That was when the whole situation became very real very fast. He was alone in the apartment, it was evening, and instead of some stranger knocking or testing the handle, the person outside was already committed enough to start kicking the door repeatedly. The commenter said he yelled out to the man and told him he would regret what he was about to do. But the warning did not stop him. The man kicked the door again.
That was when he drew his pistol.
According to the story, he went one step farther than that. He chambered a round and made sure the man outside heard it. From the way he told it, that metallic sound did what his words had not. The person on the other side of the door stopped the attack and ran off. The commenter said he then called the police. No shots were fired, and the intruder never made it through the door. But the whole encounter had already crossed well past the point of a suspicious knock. It was an active attempted forced entry that only ended once the man outside realized the apartment was not unarmed.
He also said afterward that it was the first time he had ever had to draw his weapon on anybody. In a later part of the comment, he admitted his mindset at the time was mostly about scaring “the ever living shit” out of the intruder, and he believed he got his point across. He added that the man was so close to him that he instinctively pointed the gun at the intruder’s head through the door area, which gives you a good sense of how compressed and ugly the moment felt from inside the apartment. He also said he was not new to using weapons in dangerous situations, which may explain why his reaction once the kicking started was immediate and direct.
The story he told was simple and tense. He was alone in his apartment at night while his wife was away at school. Someone started kicking the back door hard enough that he went to the peephole and saw the attack happening in real time. He warned the intruder once, got ignored, drew his pistol, and chambered a round loudly enough for the man outside to hear. That sound finally stopped the next kick, and the man ran off before getting through the door. Then the homeowner called the police and was left with the kind of memory that makes every loud noise at the door sound different afterward.
What do you think — if someone was kicking your apartment door hard enough to splinter it while you were home alone, would a loud chamber check feel like enough to stop them, or would you assume the next kick was still coming?
Original Reddit post: Has anyone here experienced a home invasion? Using a handgun for home defense?
