Long musings on home invasion

I am a victim of the Dog Days. They are aptly named; my pups won’t bark until a loudly talkative neighbor might be halfway over the fence. Not that they’d want to do that, but folks who live in this part of the country acknowledge that if you manage to defeat the 100+ pounds of night-fighter—picture nothing but shiny white teeth and rolling brown eyes coming at you out of the blackness of a Georgia night like a real-life land-locked “Jaws”—you still have the homeowner to contend with.

Some folks in Jawja might consider Jeff Foxworthy a Hollyweird sell-out, but when he made that remark about rednecks with [firearms in our] sock drawers, all was forgiven. Y’see…it’s true.

I sleep—when I sleep, which is next to never; more on that later—in the assurance that when Blessed Morphia [that’s Shakepeare, not drugs, kids] descends, I will wake to several timely alarums:

If I have somehow managed to violate every safety stricture of The Possum Den and that last cigarette of the night—usually smoked in bed; nannies be damned—has spread to flammable territory, there is the traditional wailing of the hard-wired smoke detectors.

Someone once asked me about an emergency evacuation plan. [My home nurse, actually; don’t you love talking a good game while you’re sitting in a wheelchair, dependent upon people to bring you food so you’ll live until the next gripe session?] My reply was something to the effect that I’ll grab the little dog who—hopefully—woke me up, and, depending upon the smoke levels, throw ourselves down the stairs from the second floor to the first, and out onto the deck. From there, it’s a short fall to the ground. The electric fence that keeps my night-fighter in the yard isn’t all that powerful, and given a few seconds’ time, I know where the plug is. In the final extremity, I’ll grab the electrified gate, throw it open, and scream “Run!”

I ain’t a tough guy; my life has been saved too many times by the best this country has to offer, and those guys are tough. I have a female friend whose love for dogs far exceeds these mutterings; she’ll die for her dogs; I’ll kill for mine. If the aforementioned scenario ever started playing out, I’d doubtless be the most hysterical and lost actor on the stage. I’d be screaming like a little girl. Hopefully, the Fire Department would snatch us all from the jaws of the corny cliché of “the jaws of death”. I’d be a good Democrat, standing there as the flames rose, certain that the government will “do the right thing” and keep my lame ass from perishing in the fire. I’d make no move to survive on my own, because they promised me, help is just around the corner. Right. Bet The Possum Den on inactivity.

That may be some presidential-hopeful’s wet dream of an ideal constituent. I have almost given up on Bill O’Reilly, Hannity & Crypt-Keeper Colmes, and especially the Van Susteren vulture, because they pursue their ratings-driven hunts for a poor girl who was f---cked to death and thrown out to sea with the next day’s shark chum.

And what, say ye, does all this musing have to do with the initial teaser of home invasion?

You want to find out about home invasion, live in the “BosWash; that fertile strip between Boston and Washington.

I spent too many years of what should have been a productive life listening to sources, mostly sociopaths, tell me about ”the score” Thanks to them, I have some grand vision as to what it might be like to score big, at least in the eyes of a have-not. I have known people who sprayed pursuing cop cars with high-velocity AK-47 rounds, causing disaster. For some, “The Score” is as simple as grabbing a couple thousand dollars from a bank teller’s drawer while they and the customers cower at gunpoint.

For others, “The Score” is more of an intangible, and doesn’t just involve satisfying whatever momentary greed may have triggered the cause-effect actions of the day. One of the best, and simplest, explanations of a sociopath is that this is someone who (a) reinvents themselves every morning when they wake with no regard for other humans, and (b) never starts a day with anything resembling empathy for others, regarding them as mere objects placed on this earth for their [the sociopath’s] gratification.

That’s an extremely simplistic explanation, but then, I’m a simple man. I like my educational terms in 25 words or less. I have a perverse pride in being a high-school dropout; said pride hinging on one word: rectification. I had some very uncertain years regarding what I wanted to do with my life, but there was always the moral compass that my father instilled; I knew right from wrong.

Say what you will about “family values”, and it’s been a subject of derision since the kinder, gentler Reagan/Dan Quayle era.

So, we come to a classic case of a younger sociopath wondering what the hell to do today, and an older [parental substitute] suggesting “why don’t we follow that appealing young girl home from the mall?”

They act on their impulses, and the result is murder, rape, arson, and a single day’s activities that warrant the death penalty in what should be the most ardent liberal’s pantheon of behavior.

In his book “Outrage”, former Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi details the doctrine of “the presumption of innocence”. Oooo-kay. We’ll assume for the moment that these two scumbags in Connecticut didn’t do anything they’re accused of, and they fled head-on into a police car because they share my childhood anxiety about policemen as authority figures. Gee, all those years I was a scofflaw with speed and arrogance, it never occurred to me to run from the cops. The blue lights come on, you pull over. End of story.

(Actually, I outfoxed the Georgia State Patrol twice, like the Bandit in “Smokey and the Bandit”, but youthful stupidity behind the wheel of a high-horsepower ‘60s muscle car doesn’t fabricate a moral equivalency with murder.)

In most parts of Georgia, excluding the People’s Republic of Atlanta, if you try to force your way into someone’s home, you get two responses:

(1) The more benign response of the sound of a slide racking on a large shotgun; the classic, unmistakable “snick-snack” that every movie patron over the age of eight is familiar with, or
(2) the more brief and quiet double click of a handgun action being activated, followed by a flurry of shots. If it’s a wheel gun [revolver], you may never hear the shot that blows your head off.

When I taught combat shooting some years ago, I always asked my beginning pupils what their purpose was for taking the course. If they said it was for home defense, I would advise them to get a refund from the range owner, and to buy a .12 gauge shotgun and some range practice time instead. A shotgun is cheap, easy, and you don’t have to be Annie Oakley to hit what you’re gunning for.

Georgia is not without its home invasions. One of the two murders in Union County in the last four years was a result of home invasion. In that case, it was meth-heads going after each other. We are not immune to crime; we just have less of it, and usually on a lower scale because it is taken for granted that every house with a light in the window has a firearm lurking somewhere within. Burglary of the flatlander’s summer homes is the biggest problem, followed by driving offenses concerning illegal aliens working in our prolific housing market.

Georgia is also not unfamiliar with family massacres. In the 1960s, three escaped convicts slaughtered an entire family in South Georgia, in what was eerily reminiscent of the earlier killing of the Kansas Clutter family, of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood infamy. My younger daughter was plagued by an unwelcome suitor/stalker, until the moment he was crouched below the peephole at the front door, and I opened it, stuck a .12 gauge shotgun into his eye socket, and racked the slide. That boy wasn’t right, but I think he settled down somewhat after that.

I haven’t explored Connecticut’s gun laws, but I’ll bet they are restrictive. The catch-phrase for liberals is “gun violence”, as though the weapons jump out of the drawer in the middle of the night and run to the nearest 7-11 to commit a robbery, all on their own. I’m withholding the family name, but if the Connecticut doctor had possessed a firearm and was able to reach it when the home invaders made their move, his wife and children might have survived, and evil people might be sprawled in the gutter staring at Hell instead of a court trial in front of liberal “let-‘em-go” judges.

Hey, kids, homeowners, responsible adults, I have a news flash for you: a firearm is a tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver. Put one in the junk drawer in your kitchen, and that puppy won’t move unless/until you remove it. Firearms don’t cause violence; people do. Never forget that.