Last night I was sitting with my boys in their bed room before they fell asleep. The wind blew a door closed that they left open and it sounded so much like someone entered the house that my Lab went barreling downstairs growling. I sprinted to my room and grabbed my M&p 9c from my bedroom safe and thought I correctly seated a mag loaded with hollow points. The mag did not seat correctly and I couldn’t chamber a round. It took about 5 minutes to understand that a full mag on a new gun needs to be fully seated using far more pressure than i did. Bottom line was my firearm was useless and had an intruder entered, I couldn’t defend my children.
I wad raised around firearms and have hunted for over 40 years. I’ve been stranded in the Alaska wilderness on multiple occasions, charged by grizzly bears, killed moose and caribou above the arctic circle on self guided hunts with my best friend. I’m no stranger to challenges.
But when it came to self defense at a time when seconds might have meant the difference for myself and my children, all of my life experience didn’t prepare me for that moment.
Bottom line is if you here reading and taking advantage of the wealth of information provided, make sure you get excellent training with the defensive firearms you purchase. All of your life experience my not serve you well. Drop me off in the wilderness and I’m at home. I felt sick last night with an inoperable weapon, not knowing what to do next. I’m sitting with my boys right now as they fall asleep. I won’t let this happen again.
Thanks to everyone here at M4 for all of the info you provide. I’m going to make sure that I am fully capable of protecting the most important part my life. My amazing sons.
Glad this was only a drill and you were able to learn from it.
However, I would argue that you bypassed your life experiences and that was the failure. I highly doubt you walk around in bear country with an unloaded firearm. ‘Go to’ guns need to always be ready.
My oldest son has autism and as a mental exercise he is trying to crack the code to the safe. He has successfully solved pin codes, and other combinations through observation. And no matter how hard you try, life happens and he observes. So I do not leave a round in a chamber in any firearm in the house under any circumstance. He is 9 and this is all good fun for him. I’m not in bear country. I live in the country with a special needs child. I will rethink this to a point, but having an empty chamber is necessary at the moment. He might solve the code to the safe. But he doesn’t have the strength to operate the slide and chamber a round, should he find access to the firearm.
I fear my son with autism gaining access to a fully loaded firearm more than a home invasion at the moment. This is simply one of the challenges that comes with raising a child on the spectrum.
You are right I would have adapted. I have a knife in the safe and I could have gotten the boys out of the bedroom via the porch roof, then on to the ground and into the barn. But for a couple of minutes I’m sitting there trying to calm the boys and get them into the safe room, trying to solve the problem with the firearm while trying to assess if there was someone in the house. The way my all too friendly Lab reacted, I was sure someone entered. It was a tremendous learning experience.
Bug I’m sure there are a lot of people like me here. We read and make informed purchases. Take the gun to the range and trust our general hunting and firearms experience will carry us through. Last night was another world. We laugh at the grizzlies in AK. But standing there wondering how to assess the threat of an intruder in the house with two terrified kids and then a firearm that won’t chamber a round. I’ll never allow that to happen again. Made me sick in my gut.
I’ll take a trip in bear country with a Redhawk in.44mag any day over that.
Good post, but why did it take five minutes to insert a mag and chamber a round? Are you “guestimating”? Five minutes is a very long time for anyone to get a handgun up and running, let alone someone who’s been around firearms for 40 years. Maybe it was more like 30 seconds, but it felt like five minutes? I’m fairly confident you could disassemble, reassemble, and load your M&P in five minutes.
From a hardware perspective, it sounds like your best options are to either leave the magazine inserted with an empty chamber, or to not fully load the magazine for easier seating. I’m definitely not a fan of the latter, but your home circumstances are different than many of ours.
Software-wise, I’d ask you to re-examine your mindset just a little. I get that you’ve been hunting for many years, in austere environments, often in one of the few places in North America that has dangerous game. This is different. Instead of willingly going to such a place, and hunting or fending off an animal, you thought you were being attacked at home, by a highly intelligent predator. In essence, you were in that elk’s or bear’s shoes (this is not a PETA plea). This calls for a different mindset, different tactics, and different training, as much as it calls for a different firearm and gear(which you know).
Excellent firearms safety, handling, and marksmanship are one thing on the range, another thing when lining up the sights on game, and yet another thing when you’re the intended prey. You have the right mindset, in that you want to protect your family, and your first thought when that door closed was that something was wrong. Now, take that mindset with you to the range, and let that thought, and the notion of shooting to protect you and yours, guide your training.
You could field strip and clean a weapon in 5 minutes. I don’t have enough experience. I have full confidence that there are people here that are just like me. We don’t have enough experience with our weapons and are far more confident in our abilities than we should be as it relates to home defense. The five minute period was the amount of time from when the dog bolted down the stairs until I was able to realize we weren’t dealing with an entry. Then I turned my full attention to the firearm. During the five minutes I was trying to access the firearm, get the kids into the safe room while they were terrified, my oldest had a phone and was dialing 911 and I was trying to dissuade him from that. My wife and I are separated and negotiating custody. I really did not want a police report of dad roaming the house with a loaded handgun while his Aspergers child is calling 911 for a potential false alarm entering into the negotiations. And I was trying to think of an alternative plan if someone was in the home. I was trying to problem solve with the firearm during this time, but didn’t give it my full attention
I can narrow the window down to say that had someone entered I was not able to problem solve the weapon while managing the situation in the critical minutes when a confrontation would occur.
My point in my post was that all of my wilderness experience did not translate to ensuring a successful outcome in a home defense scenario. I felt it would. There are more than a few people like me here who own excellent firearms and shoot effectively at the range. I want to encourage them to get training. The whole experience was eye opening for me. I failed to execute my plan and protect my family. That is unacceptable and will change. I hope this Helps others here.
It didn’t take five minutes get the weapon, seat a mag and chamber a round. It took seconds to accomplish the first two. Since the mag wasn’t seated fully I couldn’t chamber a round. I tried problem solving during the whole scenario but it was not successful given everything else that was going. At the time I had to choose between giving the weapon more time, assess if anyone was in the home, consider getting the kids out via the roof. A classic experience of trying to problem solve under a high stress moment which is everything training is suppose to help. I failed because I figured I would succeed in a high stress environment as I had in other high stress environments. The two aren’t the same and require different skill sets and experience.
Absolutely. That’s what I want to communicate here. Two completely different world’s here. You can drop me into about any wilderness area in North America and I’ll be fine. Man I failed the lesson of the other night and I can’t believe it. I understand why and need to grab some humility and get some training.
Wow! I’m glad to hear that you and yours are safe. It’s also great that you’re taking an “episode” like this and using it to learn the limitations of your current defense paradigm and to figure out how to improve it.
Fantastic and thought provoking thread.
I have spoken to many who purchased a new handgun for example and when I asked what (if any) training they had and what (if any) training schedule they had, a common response was what you started above: they had been around guns their entire lives, hunted, etc. Sure, they are probably ahead of the curve of say those who have no experience with firearms, but being proficient with a handgun for SD/HD/CCW is a very different skill set than say hunting, or plinking with your buds, etc. I was invited to go shoot skeet recently. And having grown up around guns, done some formal training (though I would benefit from FAR more truth be told), some competing in IDPA, regular range trips, etc, I totally sucked at skeet as I expected. I was under no illusions any of my prior training or experiences would translate to skeet, and it didn’t. Again, I probably learned a tad faster than others with no fire arms experience to be sure, but it was a very different skill set from what I’m used to doing.
It’s a totally false sense of security to think otherwise.
“Failure” is some times relative. Yeah, if this were live, the cost could have been high. You recognized that. Having said that, you identified a deficiency in your training and home security plan, and now you’re working to fix it. A “lightbulb moment”? Sure. Has learning occurred? Definitely. But, unlike others, you might get another chance, so to speak.
You’re right in that I learned the lesson and that isn’t a failure so to speak. I’ll never forget the fear in my boys eyes and the horrible feeling I had inside for several minutes asking myself how I was going to protect us with an inoperable weapon. I am going to be hard on myself for that one for a long time. Can’t tell you how glad I am that it happened.
It is interesting how these intruder “sounds” sometimes occur - triggering our tactical response:)
In my case - a suction cup bath mat that had been “suckered” to the shower stall wall dried out and fell off. It caught a couple of mostly-full shampoo bottles on the way down - and all of this reverberated in the one-piece fiberglass shower stall. The LOUD noise came from a part of the house that had no door, so my immediate thoughts centered on someone coming in through the window (played that game before, a few decades back:) Needless to say – the problem was “solved” after cutting several pies to get back to that part of the house where I cornered the interloper in the bathroom! (And all rounds expended were center-of-mass on the bath mat:)
Sorry to hear that you had a bad day so to speak, but you learned something very important so it’s not a loss by any stretch of the imagination.
I’ve found that seating a full mag on a closed slide is a PITA on a lot of guns. This is doubly true on new or lightly used mags. Springs just aren’t broken in or in some extreme cases the magazine isnt designed for a +1 arrangement. Potential solutions to your dilemma are to download 1 round and understand that you’re only going to have 16 available. This is what I did with my wife’s MP9.
You could also try to leave a loaded mag in place for a time while you’re around and see if it alleviates the issue.
While you may not trust the safe, no reason you can’t have the firearm securely concealed on your person, properly with round in chamber, while at home (or always, depending on CCW laws where you live).
I agree you should practice and train, and I feel you should also vet all your equipment including ammunition, mags, etc. In other words, don’t practice with one ammunition then switch to defense ammo you’ve never fired.