Would you ...
Carry at Home?
By Kathy Jackson
Time for true confessions: I carry a handgun on my body even when I am
at home.
Why?
There were a lot of reasons that went into this. Oddly enough, the entire
reason I got a handgun in the first place was so that I could wear it
at home. It wasn't until I'd purchased the gun, and looked into the laws,
that I realized the simplest thing to do would be to keep the handgun
under my clothes every hour I was awake, taking it off only to enter places
where the gun was illegal. That was when carrying the gun became my default setting, and taking it off
became something that required deliberate thought.
When we moved into our rural home, my husband and I realized that our
home security needs would be different than they had been when we were
city dwellers. For one thing, our nearest neighbors were well over a quarter
mile away, and rarely home. We couldn't therefore count on that legendary
country neighborliness to bail us out if anything bad happened. Furthermore,
because our county is large but lightly populated, a fast police response
would take over a half an hour on a good night. Finally, my husband had
gotten a job which forced him to work irregular hours, and he often was
gone late into the night, leaving me home alone with our young children.
For all these reasons, I decided that I really wanted to have a firearm
available to protect myself and our children when my husband wasn't around
to do the job. But my very active children had taught me that they could
get into more trouble more quickly
than anyone else would ever believe, and I was worried about keeping them
safe. How was I going to keep them from getting the gun?
At first I thought I would use a long gun, probably a shotgun, to defend
our home and family. Since I had very little experience with handguns,
but had handled shotguns as a youngster, a shotgun seemed more familiar
and easier to work with. Furthermore, nearly anyone you ask will tell
you that a shotgun is an ideal home defense weapon, because it is very
powerful, very threatening, and because (this one cracks me up), "You
barely have to aim it."1
But I got thinking about it. If a rapist or murderer came slamming through
my front door, would I have time to fetch a shotgun from the next room
in time to save my children's lives and protect myself? Possibly not,
especially if the gun were securely locked up apart from its ammunition,
and its ammunition were secured behind a second lock, as most safety experts
recommend.
Worse still, if someone did come slamming in the front door, or slithering
in through a window, would I have to make the awful choice to leave my
children alone in the room with him in order to grab the gun?
What if he grabbed one of my kids and just ... left? I shuddered at the
thought!
I considered leaving the shotgun accessible to me in the living room instead
of in a back room. But what if we were all in the back of the house and
an intruder entered? The dilemma remained the same.
Then I wondered, if I could easily get the gun, what would stop the children
from getting it? They'd already taught me that they could get into
nearly everything in the house when I wasn't looking. I'd long
considered childproof locks
a sick joke. So what could I do?
There had to be a better way.
Around this time, a friend of ours revived his own interest in handgunning,
and invited me to come shoot with him and some mutual friends. Why not?
As I fired a handgun for the first time in my adult life, it suddenly
occurred to me that I was holding the answer to our home-defense needs
in my hands. At that moment, I decided that I would get a handgun, learn
how to use it, and keep it with me at home.
Just Paranoia?
- Of the 207,240 rapes and sexual assaults in America
in 2004, 30% happened inside the woman's own home.
- Of the 83,920 rapes and sexual assaults committed by
a stranger, 42% happened inside the woman's own home.
- Of the 99,130 incidents of completed robbery in which
the victim was injured, 31% happened inside the victim's own home.
- Of the 895,340 cases of aggravated assault, 18% happened
within the victim's own home.2
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After all, I reasoned, I never have any idea what the little darlings
might be up to in the next room. They might have figured out the combination
to the safe, and they might have snuck away with my keys to try them all
out on the ammunition cabinet.
But no matter what my pestilential children might do out of my sight,
I knew that I could keep a gun underneath my personal clothing
without them getting their grubby little paws on it. At least, not without
me noticing.
So I set out to do just that. I decided I would carry a gun at home.
Not long after that watershed moment, and with the help of that same family
friend, I purchased my first firearm, belt, and holster. It took me about
24 hours to realize that a woman with
curves cannot comfortably carry on the hip, and I moved the holster
around to in front of my hip instead.
It took another 24 hours for me to realize that it was just silly to lock
the gun away when I left the house. After all, bad stuff happens in public
too. Furthermore, with multiple toddlers, I was already fed up with taking
what seemed like 16 dozen trips in and out of the house every time we
went anywhere.3
I surely didn't need to add yet one more thing to our leaving routine.
At this point, you are probably wondering about practical little questions
-- stuff like, "What do you do with the gun at night?" and "But
what about kids sitting on your lap?" and "Isn't that uncomfortable?4
Those questions each deserve an article of their own, but for now it should
be enough to say that we worked things out.
Because the gun is concealed, and because I defused the
kids' curiosity early on, I've never had that much trouble hugging
them or cuddling them or playing with them while wearing the gun. I learned
to keep them from bumping the gun when we were playing, and otherwise
it simply doesn't come up.
At night, I lock my bedroom door. I leave the gun inside a fanny pack
lying in an open lockbox near the bed. If the kids need me in the middle
of the night, I either lock the lockbox before I open the door, or pick
the fanny pack up and put it on with my robe. Undoubtedly others could
find other solutions to this problem, but this solution has worked pretty
well for our family.
Is carrying a gun at home for everyone? No, most decidedly not. It takes
a certain commitment to carry it off. But I'm here to tell you it's not
impossible. For me, carrying the gun at home seemed the easiest and simplest
answer to the question, "How do I keep the gun away from the children
but accessible to myself?"