Pincus - Defend yourself: a comprehensive security plan for the armed homeowner

The information you are about to read will be most obviously valuable, if you have a firearm for home-defense. Even if you do not, I believe that the information contained here is still important.

If you have not yet made the choice to have a firearm, or several, staged for the defense of your home or family, this information will be instrumental in your decision of whether or not you should. If you do decide to make that choice, the information in this book will guide your purchases, preparation, and training. But even if you never decide to have a home-defense firearm, this information will help you in many other facets of home-defense. This book will be especially important if you have family members youre interested in protecting in a worst-case scenario.

When youre inside your home, you should be safe and secure, but the fact is you may be targeted by someone who wants to hurt you or your family. You may, as so often is told in the news headlines of today, become the victim of a terrible act of violence inside your home. Accepting that fact and preparing to keep it from happening is not only a right, it is your responsibility. By making it harder for violent predators to hurt us and by actively defending ourselves from them, we can reduce the propensity for them to act. By making your home and family safer, you truly contribute to making the world a better place.

Rob Pincus

Ive known Rob Pincus for many years. His is one of the most inquisitive and innovative minds in the firearms and tactics world. Ive taken some of his training, and hes taken some of mineand in this book, I think, he has hit some nails solidly on their heads.

I was at the NRA Annual Meetings in Houston, in 2012, when the mainstream media pounced on Rob. In the course of a lecture on response to home invasion, he included the option of having a gun in a lockbox in your kids room, so as to allow you and your spouse to run there and arm yourselves, as just one possible option. The anti-gunners in the media went nuts, creating the false implication that Pincus was a crazy man to suggest that loaded guns be left indiscriminately available to little children.

Of course, that wasnt what he said, nor something he implied. Rob had quite clearly stated that in this training model, the gun would locked in a safe container, one that only the parent could open. It would allow the parents to get to the kids room to protect them there, and faster than the proposition of the parent liberating the weapon in their own master bedroom first and then making their way toward the childrens roomand, perhaps, too late. Again, Rob presented this idea as a clearly valid option, but closed minds just couldnt comprehend it.

To get the most from the book youre about to read, you need a practical mind and an open onesomething the media clearly lacked during Robs lecture I attended. Rob explains his explanations in precise detail. Therefore, it will take a detailed reading for you to get the most out of this book.

No two instructors in this business agree 100 percent on everything, and thats certainly true of Rob Pincus and me. At the same time, Rob has, undeniably, put some solid, life-saving advice into this book. The pre-planning he advises will very likely make the difference between life and death, if you are ever in the situation this book was written to address. Give it the careful reading it deserves and youll better achieve the safety you and your family deserve.

Massad Ayoob, August 2013

About Massad Ayoob:One of the pre-eminent fighting handgun trainers in the world, Massad Ayoob is the author of Gun Digest Book of Concealed Carry, Combat Shooting with Massad Ayoob, The Gun Digest Book of Combat Handgunnery, and several other books (see www.gundigeststore.com for more information and resources). Ayoob is one of the very few Five Gun Masters among the 10,000-member International Defensive Pistol Association, and was the first to earn that title. He served 19 years as chair of the Firearms Committee of the American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers and several years as a member of the Advisory Board of the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association. In addition to teaching for those groups, he founded the Lethal Force Institute, has taught for the International Association of Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors and International Homicide Investigators, and frequently serves as an expert witness in court cases about shootings and weapons. His Stress-Fire method of reflexive, yet accurate shooting at high speed was adopted by the U.S. Army as part of its standard pistol training course. Today, he runs the Massad Ayoob Group, training students everywhere in the art of armed self-defense.

There are three places a gun owner is most likely to fire their weaponand two of those places rightfully scare the hell out of most reasonable people.

We fire our weapons at the range in case, God forbid, we have to ever fire them at home or on the street. As responsible gun owners, we value our marksmanship skills. We understand that we train not only to hit what were shooting at, but also to make sure we dont hit unintended targets. But is this enough?

Train like you fight and fight like you train is a popular mantra with military and law enforcement officers, and for good reason. When placed under a highly stressful situation, human beings default to whats natural. In a life or death situation, elevated heart rate, tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, and a host of other involuntary physiological responses are all but guaranteed. As your bodys fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in, youll either freeze on the spot or default to how you have trained yourself to react.

This is more than aligning your guns sights on your target, calming your breathing, and gently depressing the trigger. Before you even engage a would-be attacker, you have to have already thought through your entire plan of action. If you think you can put that off and just decide how youll handle things if and when the situation presents itself, you are in for a very rude and potentially deadly awakening.

In addition to the host of moral and legal implications involved with the use of a firearm in a deadly threat or a threat of grievous bodily harm scenario, there is a tsunami of tactical implications. If you hear the glass break while youre in the kitchen, where will you run first? Your childrens room? Your own bedroom to retrieve your firearm and then to your childrens room? Is your bedroom even the best place to keep your firearm? Can you afford to safely secure a firearm in your childrens room? Can you afford not to? What about keeping one in the den? How about another in the kitchen?