Have you pulled a gun in self defense?

[CZShooter]

Twenty-some-odd years ago, when my wife and I were newlyweds, we lived in a house my parents owned...which was in a bad neighborhood (where I grew up). I was awakened one night to the sounds of someone messing around the house. I heard them trying to open a window...then I heard the back screen-door being forced open.

I got up and went to the bedroom closet and retrieved the only gun I owned at the time, which was a single-shot 20 gauge. I loaded a #6 game load and headed for the kitchen and met the culprit as he forced the back door open. It was dark and I barely was able to recognize that it was my drunk-ass brother-in-law fumbling his way around the kitchen. He was in the area at a party...got drunk...and was looking for a place to sleep it off. I flipped on the light and he looked at me...paused for a long moment...and said "you were gonna shoot me!" If only he knew how close I was to pulling the trigger...

He learned a valuable lesson about breaking and entering that night.

[wisconsin]

First home we bought back in "81". Someone told me the first thing you do is change the locks. So being that I do listen to good advice I did. We weren't in that house a week when in the middle of the night my wife gets up to go to the batroom and comes and wakes me up to tell me there is someone on our porch. Plain as day because of the street light you could see his shadow at the window. I went and got my pump shotgun and came back to the living room.By this time he had the screen door open and was trying to open the door to which I made the loud sound of a shotgun being loaded. He took off and I went and change my underware. I never had to try and convince my wife from that day on that we needed to keep a firearm close by.

[tombogan03884]

The answer is..."not really". The point of my story is "know your target". This happened recently. My wife was out of town. She raises dogs for the show ring. I had just finished bring in the dogs and feeding them. Lights out in the dog house around 7pm. It was dark-ish outside because it was about to rain.

After being in house a couple of minutes the dogs made a great racket. They do that sometimes. Deer come around, cats come around, bunnies come around...and coyotes (so my wife says).

So I think maybe I left a kennel door unlock and a dog is running aroung the dog house causing havoc. I look through the window of the door first, the lights are off it is dark inside...nothing runing around.

I open the door and step in...to the far right there is a person just beginning to rise up from a kennel with an object in their hand. My hand goes to my revolver and begins to pull it from my pocket holster...when I hear:

"Hello, Mr. Worsham! I was just getting something out of the freezer for dinner".

It was the teenage girl from next door. They have remodeling work going on and the workers needed to turn the electricity on and off sooo, my wife had the neighbor put her frig stuff in the frig we keep in the dog house and didn't mention it to me (not that she needed to).

Know your target.

Don, that reminded me of another one.  I was first on call for our companie's alarm system back twenty years ago.  My boss was getting tired of being "fined" for the police responding to false alarms, so I went in alone, searching a five story building by myself.  I was on an upper floor, the only light was by the elevator, and I could see someone poking around an assembly table.  I pulled my gun and was tracking him while he walked towards the light, intending on stopping him there. When he got to the light, I could see it was a cop!  He didn't see me, so I put away my gun and called to him.  He just happened to be passing by, saw a door ajar, and came in to investigate, his story anyway.  I was so shook up I wasn't about to question him.  It's just too easy to misread a situation.

These 2 situations perfectly illustrate my point that whether you WANT to talk about an incident or not, by doing so you provide education to the rest of us.
  The lesson here is KNOW WHAT YOU ARE SEEING, a figure in the dark ! Is it a burglar ? Or is one of your Kids going back to bed after using the bathroom ?