An interesting conversation arose at work yesterday. A co-worker and myself were talking about how home invasions seem to be on the rise in our area. That led to us talking about home security and various ways to make a home more secure. This conversation gave me the idea to start a series of blog posts about home security. Home security is just as important now as it will be after the SHTF.
Any survival retreat, bug out or bug in location needs kill-zones. I have found that baby gates make great kill-zones inside of your home. For instance, while you are sleeping your dog growls or barks just enough to get your attention and you hear some shuffling from inside your house. Instinctively you grab your home defense weapon and go to investigate. When you look down the hall an armed bad guy is gingerly climbing the baby gate at the end of your hall. Since he was focused on quietly clearing the obstacle you catch him off guard and potentially save your family. Say the bad guy decided to run in for a quick grab and run burglary. The baby gate may trip him up. The baby gate helped to create a kill-zone inside of your home.
Before I start writing the content of the post I am going to give you a portion of Wikipedia's definition of a kill-zone:
"In military tactics, the kill zone, also known as killing zone, is an area entirely covered by defensive fire, an element of ambush within which an approaching enemy force is trapped and destroyed. The objective of the defensive force is to quickly kill or capture all enemy soldiers inside the kill zone."
While the name, kill-zone, sounds romanticized it is nothing more that a funnel for the bad guys. A properly designed kill zone a slow down or funnel the bad guys to a point in which you can react to their bad actions.
Any survival retreat, bug out or bug in location needs kill-zones. I have found that baby gates make great kill-zones inside of your home. For instance, while you are sleeping your dog growls or barks just enough to get your attention and you hear some shuffling from inside your house. Instinctively you grab your home defense weapon and go to investigate. When you look down the hall an armed bad guy is gingerly climbing the baby gate at the end of your hall. Since he was focused on quietly clearing the obstacle you catch him off guard and potentially save your family. Say the bad guy decided to run in for a quick grab and run burglary. The baby gate may trip him up. The baby gate helped to create a kill-zone inside of your home. |
| I like these types of gates. |
I have a preferred type of baby gate. The ones with the built in door and latch seem to be the most convenient and hardest to knock down. They are truly semi-permanent. The door is handy because the ones that you take down or step over get real annoying real fast.
If you have a stair well a gate place at the top and bottom of a stair case can slow a bad guy down exponentially and buy your precious time to react in a bad and potentially violent situation. On top of the stated uses these gates are just handy for controlling pets and they do a good job at their intended use as well.
I will be posting more of these short home security posts from time to time so be sure to subscribe for free if your haven't already. Just click the 'Subscribe via RSS' button on the top right of the page. If your don't use an RSS reader you can subscribe by email at the bottom of this page.
