Controlling Your Entryways

Dear Fellow Survivalist;

For most of us, defending our home means defending ourselves once someone breaks into our home. That’s reasonable, because the law only allows us to use deadly force in self-defense or the defense of others. Depending on the state we live in, we may have the right to stand our ground, defending our homes or not. Not all states see this as a right.

In such a scenario, where you know someone trying to break into your home, your attention is divided out of necessity. Most homes have multiple entryways a criminal can use, including the entry door, some sort of back door and multiple windows. While statistically criminals are more likely to come in through your entry door, than any other entryway, there is no guarantee they will do so. They have the initiative and the more creative of them will use it to their advantage.

While this seems to leave everything at the criminal’s advantage, you don’t have to leave it that way. Actually, you shouldn’t. It is your home and that should give you the advantage, even if they still have the initiative. But you may have to do some things to make sure you maintain that advantage.

What do I mean by that? Mostly I mean reducing the options for anyone trying to break into your home, so that your attention doesn’t have to be divided. Taking that a step further, you can minimize the directions they can approach your home from, so that you are most likely to see them approach as well.

By and large, criminals are lazy; that’s why they are criminals. They also tend to think that they’re smarter than their victims. But it’s their laziness that we can usually count on. No criminal is going to work hard to get what they want. Rather, they’re trying to get what they need, the easiest possible way. So, making things harder for them is an almost sure way of protecting yourself.

This is the whole reason why we use multiple locks to secure our homes. The old saw about locks keeping honest people honest is true. They also help keep criminals honest, if they are used correctly. Even so, we need to be aware that criminals regularly kick their way through dead-bolted doors, so we need to understand the limitations of the locks that we use and do things to strengthen them.

But that’s not my main point today. The point I’d like to make is that we can accomplish a lot, simply by denying criminals easy access to the various entry points of our home. I’m not talking about locks here or burglar bars over windows, but things that make it hard for them to even get to the windows.

Windows                  

For any criminal to get in through your windows, they must first get to the windows themselves. Unless all they want to do is vent their anger at you, standing afar off and throwing rocks through your windows isn’t going to do them the least bit of good. They actually have to get themselves through the window.

Denying criminals access to windows is one of the easiest things you can do. All it takes is planting bushes beneath the windows. If they can’t stand there, they can’t very well climb through the window. Just make sure that your bushes are wider than the window opening, or that you have taller bushes on either side, so that they can’t stand beside the window and climb through from there.

Back Door

The back door is probably the hardest thing to secure on most homes. That’s because for the last 30 years or so, they’ve been building homes with sliding glass doors. While there are things that can be done to make that door more secure, short of installing burglar bars over the whole door, you can never make it totally secure.

However, you can make your backyard more secure, so that criminals can’t just walk up to your back door, without being challenged. The easiest way to do this is to put a lock on the gate and keep it locked. Yet few people bother to do this.

If you have an enclosed back porch, this is even better, as you can lock both the porch door and the back door, making them have to get through two locked doors. While neither is going to be hard to get through, the combination of the two makes it hard to get through without attracting attention.

The Boundaries of Your Property

It’s more or less impossible to make it so that nobody can get onto your property at all. Doing so would probably be too obvious anyway, marking your home as a target. But that’s not to say that you shouldn’t do anything. I’m a firm believer in using fences and hedges to enclose my property.

The idea here isn’t so much as to keep people out, as it is to control how they come onto your property. Going back to the idea that criminals are lazy, if you put a hedge around your front yard, but have a gate at the walkway, they’ll go for the gate, rather than going over the hedge. What this does for you is prevent them from approaching your home in a way that they can’t be seen.

I have a bit of an advantage, in that my office is in my home. Even so, the hedge around my front yard means that nobody can approach the house, without me seeing it from my office. So that’s one more thing that makes it easier for me to secure my property. It may not be perfect, but every little bit helps. Just like keeping your powder dry and your survival gear close at hand.

I have a bit of an advantage, in that my office is in my home. Even so, the hedge around my front yard means that nobody can approach the house, without me seeing it from my office. So that’s one more thing that makes it easier for me to secure my property. It may not be perfect, but every little bit helps. Just like keeping your powder dry and your survival gear close at hand.

Dr. Rich

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