Tactical Home Defense: Defensive Positioning

By engaging intruders at greater range, you increase your own mobility and situational awareness. You then also have the ability to fall back to successive defensive positions as threats advance towards you.

Identify good covered and concealed positions that offer sightlines along likely threat avenues of approach. With the help of your senses, identify which direction intruders are coming from, move to your first defensive position, and engage the intruders.

Remain alert for intruders coming from other directions or trying to flank around and surprise you from behind. As intruders approach, fall back to your next defensive position. In some cases, you may want to fire a few shots to suppress the intruders before falling back. If you are operating with a partner, your partner can provide cover as you fall back. By falling back in this way, you offer yourself multiple opportunities to engage the intruders from behind cover or concealment, making it more likely that they will run away and/or buying you and your family time to escape.

The diagram below gives a generalized example of how you might establish multiple defensive fall back positions.  Consider the layout of your home (or place of business) and what defensive fallback positions you might employ, if necessary. 

When you must defend from inside a room, it is often better to position further back in the room than to remain close to the door. By staying back, you can move to the left and right and expose only small slices of the area outside the room at a time, much like the sweep technique, also known as “slice-the-pie” or “threshold evaluation.”

If you position right next to the door and peek around the edge, you will expose yourself to much more of the adjacent room at once and you will be easier for intruders to spot. If possible, try to move furniture within the room to offer you some cover as you assume different defensive angles.

The diagram below gives a general example of how you can observe most of the family room, and even some areas beyond, from positions deeper in the master bedroom. Also, take note that while you may be able to see far into adjacent rooms, intruders can still crouch down to hide behind larger objects such as sofas, cabinets or countertops.

As you develop your defensive plan, it is natural and likely instinctual for you to end up in a position where the attackers are in front of you and your family members (or employees or co-workers) are behind you. While this might seem like a good idea, it is actually quite dangerous because it puts your family in the line of fire.

See the image on the lower left below for an example of this and the inherent risk of such positioning.

In order to reduce this risk, you may have to separate yourself from your family. While it may be a risk to leave your family alone, you must weigh that risk against the risk of drawing hostile fire in the direction of your family.

While it can be effective to engage an intruder at range, if you are close to your family you might unintentionally draw hostile fire, or the intruders themselves, in the direction of your family.

In some cases, it might be better to attempt to draw attention away from your family. Remember that, even if you get into a gun fight with intruders and they shoot you, they may then decide to flee. So even if the intruders somehow kill you, if the rest of your family is hidden somewhere else, your family may still escape the intruders’ attention and survive.

While it might seem that glass paneled doors are less preferable than a more solid wood or even steel door in a defensive situation, they can actually prove extremely useful if you plan to defend your home (or place of business) with a firearm.

First, you should emplace a thin, translucent shade for your glass door or choose a door with frosted glass such as in the photo at the lower right below. This sort of shade or glass will be impossible to see through in some situations but easy to see through in other situations. The key is the lighting around and on either side of the door.

First, turn all lights out on your side of the door and then ensure there is a strong light source further back in the room on the other side of the door. If possible, make the light difficult to turn off or employ a remote control switch that only you can activate.

Next, if you stay far enough back from the door, as a backlit intruder approaches the door you will be able to see him clearly but he will not be able to see you. This silhouetting will make it almost impossible for the intruder to attempt to bypass or break the lock on the door without being seen and getting shot; and, it allows you to see exactly where the intruder is positioned in relation to the door, allowing you to place well aimed fire if necessary.

Incorporating these sorts of shade and light configurations around glass doors in your home or place of business can offer you a critical advantage in a defensive gun fight.