Panic at 5am

[Julie]

Y'all, I do NOT wake up before 8am if I can help it. That I am writing this before 5:30 in the morning, you can believe me when I say this JUST happened.

The hubs and I were fast asleep and I heard a noise on the baby monitor that I did not recognize...like an alarm clock going off. I was trying to wake my husband up so he could hear it and tell me what it was so I could go turn it off. Before he was coherent, the phone rang and I knew that it was our house alarm that I was hearing. I answered the phone and my husband figured out what was happening then. He's the one who jumped up and got my gun. How could it slip my mind, even from a dead sleep, that #1) I had a gun or #2) that I needed to get it??? That was way more important than answering the phone.

Then my husband, who has literally put ONE magazine thru my gun way back in January, handed me the gun while I was on the phone with the alarm company with a confused look on his face. I took the safety off and handed it back to him and DROPPED it in the pass off. Chambered, no safety. We both screamed and probably gave the poor lady at the alarm company a heart attack. Luckily it did not discharge. And luckily it woke me up enough that I didn't blurt out what had just happened to the alarm lady.

My husband started to clear the downstairs and I went to our alarm panel to tell him which sensor had tripped and to turn off the alarm. Luckily it did not appear that any of the windows on that sensor had been broken and luckily they were all locked. Downstairs seems secure so we let the lady at the alarm company clear the alarm.

Hubs is back in bed (how can he sleep now??) and I am keeping a close eye on the toddlers on the monitor. Luckily they slept thru the whole thing. I'm up at the computer typing to you all with my gun on the table right next to me just in case and thinking thru what just happened.

• I'm a little ticked off that our house alarm was not loud enough to wake us up. It's located in our attic and you can hear it downstairs, but we have never noticed that you can't really hear it in our bedroom when the door is closed. Is there a way to make it louder? Are there rules about how loud it can be?
  
  What a reminder that we all need to practice, practice, practice! The gun is mine, so my husband hasn't practiced. I found out I was pregnant 3 days after I took my CHL class in February, so I haven't been back to the range. My baby recently died, so I can go practice now without fear of harming her...but I haven't been able to find any ammo. Many thanks to all the hoarders. Tips on practicing without ammo?
  
  How does one practice emergency response from a dead sleep?
  
  Thankful to be alive and thankful that whoever it was, was scared off by an alarm we didn't hear. If they had come in, they would have been on top of us before we were awake...not to mention that the gun would have still been in the safe.

[Jumping Frog]

Sounds like you were blessed with a an emergency "dress rehearsal" instead if having to cope with a real emergency.

Time to do a post-mortem, and assess what worked and didn't work.

1. Sounds like you need to change the alarm, perhaps wire in a secondary horn.
2. Clearly defined roles and an understanding of who does what. Practice, just like a fire drill.
3. Clearing a house is very dangerous if the wrong person is there, even for trained police officers.
4. You might want to consider your intruder emergency plan include you and your husband going to your children's bedroom, defining your best cover, and wait for police to clear the house. Reinforce the door for that room.
5. Read up on dry fire if you do not have ammo to practice. Lots of forum messages on this topic.

I am sorry you lost your baby.

[AEA]

And......get yourself a good dog.

[Julie]

AEA - our neighbor murdered our German Shepherd last year. I would LOVE another one. We have two toddlers, no time to devote to a 4-legged family member, and a fear of losing another dog to the neighbors. My GSD would have woken us up even before the alarm went off if she were still here.

Jumping Frog - I understand what you're saying about clearing the house. I was pretty nervous for him to do that too, but there's not any way to get from the downstairs master to the upstairs kids rooms without covering most of the downstairs on the way. Major safety issue with the floor plan of this house!

[Purplehood]

Practice 'dry-firing'. It is done in the Military all the time.
Not really a suitable substitute for firing ammo, but it helps develop good habits.

[AEA]

Sorry to hear about your GSD.
Might want to have the alarm company come out and check/replace those sensors that caused a fault.

You or they can also install an additional siren somewhere in the main portion of your home.

[Diesel42]

The previous posts cover the most important points.
FWIW, there are no restrictions on the volume of your siren horn. My attic is very insulated and my neighbors could hear my siren better than I. So, I climbed into the attic, spliced another wire at the siren and dropped the wire through the ceiling to the hallway outside my bedroom. The second interior horn achieves 90 decibels, enough to drive me out of the hallway when I tested it.

Talk to your husband and consider a "live" exercise. Set an alarm (different from your normal wake up alarm) for 2 or 3am. Even though your groggy and you know it's an exercise, make yourself acquire your weapon and a light. Go through the process of clearing the house. When I did this, I felt like I was being silly and my dogs thought it was a game. Yet, doing this exercise once a year assures me that I can get moving and do the right things even though I'm sleepy.

Stay safe and practise, practise, practise.
Happy Trails! N

[Redneck_Buddha]

I had a situation a few weeks ago where I was awakened from REM sleep and should have grabbed my gun, but bolted from the bedroom into the house without it. I like the idea of periodic drills run from a sound sleep.

[chasfm11]

Sorry to hear about your GSD.
Might want to have the alarm company come out and check/replace those sensors that caused a fault.

On both counts

I would have your alarm company out to look at both the sensors and your horn situation. There are a couple of options. You could add a horn somewhere or you could add a control keypad with a piezo right in your bedroom. The piezo will sound when the alarm is initially tripped and not wait until the timeout (assuming you have one - most people do on their doors) Many of the piezos are loud enough to wake you from a sound sleep. We have a control keypad in our bedroom now and had one there in our last house as well. We also have a horn in hallway closet. It is loud enough to wake the dead. I have two horns on a separate driver for outside.

For me, AD/ND exposure goes up the more times you have to handle a gun especially in high adrenalin circumstances. I got a Nano Vault safe because, like you, we have a young one around from time to time. It has a 4 button combination on the top and I practice opening it many times each week. The door flops down and I can reach in and grab a pistol. Once it is in my hand, finger indexed along the barrel, I can feel secure that nothing bad is going to happen unless I want it to. There is no fussing about picking it up and handling it. My tactical light goes in my weak hand. It sits on top of the dresser, ready to go, too.

[The Annoyed Man]

Your post-mortem should include consideration of a few thoughts.....

A) where were your two toddlers? Do they have their own room together or separate rooms? Where are their rooms relative to yours? Are they in the same room that your baby was in before she died? If she was in a separate room from the others, now that she is gone, why was the baby monitor still on, or is that an oversight? I ask, because maybe the monitor might be better used in your toddlers' room(s).

B) as Jumping Frog said, clearing a house is a very dangerous proposition if there actually is an intruder inside already. Even professionals do not like to do it if they don't have to. ESPECIALLY until both of you get some familiarity with gun handling and rudimentary tactics, you should be thinking more along the lines of creating an "inner fortress" in the home—probably your bedroom, but not necessarily—scooping up your kids and retreating into the fortress as quickly as possible and holding out there until help arrives. If that fortress room has a single point of access.....say the bedroom door....it is a LOT easier and safer to defend the room with a handgun at the choke-point of the door, from behind cover or concealment (educate yourself about the difference between the two), than it is to exit the room and go hunting for bad guys. What happens if your husband exits the fortress to go clear the house, he gets taken out, and now the bad guys have your gun and you are defenseless?

C) make sure you have everything you're going to need already prepositioned in the "fortress." Phone lines and power lines can be cut/switched off. Make sure you have a charged cellphone (your fortress should have good reception). Make sure you have more than one weapon handy......I suggest a pistol AND a pump action shotgun. (Ignore Crazy Uncle Joe's advice about what to do with that shotgun.) Pump action shotguns are easily and quickly loaded, if you are worried about safety with little ones in the house. And they can be left with magazine loaded but chamber empty, stored up high on a shelf where toddlers can't reach it. Then you can just shuck a round into the chamber. DON'T try to clear your house holding a long barreled gun out in front of yourself......good way to get it taken from you. Use it only as a fortress defense until you know what you're doing.

D) TRAINING!!!! If you have any friends who are current or former military, ask one of them over and do a walk-through of your house. Knowing and "prepping" the battlefield heavily favors the informed. Picture scenarios: if entry was forced through this window, what would your plan be; through that door, what would your plan be; etc.? What part of the house is defensible, what part is not? What is your line of retreat? Etc., etc. Dry fire your guns until you are confident with the handling (make sure ALL ammunition is kept in a separate room from the one you are practicing in. Buy some "snap-caps" (available almost anywhere that sells guns/ammo) and practice some reloading drills and dry-firing. SPEND TIME AT THE RANGE!!!. Get familiar with recoil, sight picture, etc. And if you can afford it and have the time, take a training course together where a professional can teach you both some techniques about moving and shooting. But I have to emphasize that this last piece is only for after you've already got mastery of the basics. "Shoot & scoot" has no value if you left your kids behind unprotected.

E) pray. God is good, and His will is perfect. Rest in it.

Our moderator/member Excaliber has actually made a profession of giving this advice and training. I would seek his counsel.

[Julie]

TAM - Sorry for the confusion. There is a baby monitor in each of the toddlers' rooms and that is what allowed me to hear the alarm this morning. The baby was stillborn a few weeks ago, she never had a room...she just kept me away from the firing range for about 4.5 months while I was pregnant.

Our master is downstairs and the kids rooms are upstairs...there isn't a way to get to our kids without confronting anyone who might be in the house. We'll be fixing that issue whenever we build our dream house! We do have a shotgun, but we keep it upstairs for protection in the times we're all upstairs.

Thanks for all the suggestions and taking the time to write everything out so clearly...looks like we've got our work cut out for us!

[anomie]

Your post-mortem should include consideration of a few thoughts.....

A) where were your two toddlers? Do they have their own room together or separate rooms? Where are their rooms relative to yours? Are they in the same room that your baby was in before she died? If she was in a separate room from the others, now that she is gone, why was the baby monitor still on, or is that an oversight? I ask, because maybe the monitor might be better used in your toddlers' room(s).

B) as Jumping Frog said, clearing a house is a very dangerous proposition if there actually is an intruder inside already.

I would like to point out that where the kids are and what rooms may impact what you need to/decide to do, and it should be thought about (imho).

In my house all the bedrooms are upstairs. If I didn't have kids, if I woke up in the middle of the night and thought there was an intruder actually in the house, I would just get my gun, lock the bedroom door and call the cops.

I can't do that because I have kids and their safety is more important than my safety. So the general plan for when I believe there's an intruder in the house is to a) be armed, b) call 911, c) everyone into one bedroom (it'll be one of the kid's rooms just because it's easier for my wife and I to move through and get one kid to another kid's room, rather than trying to take two kids to our room), make sure that room is clear except for us, lock the door there. (edit: also, cover the door from a spot that keeps my wife & kids out of the line of fire if they start shooting at me).

The cops can clear my house, they're trained to do it and they're better equipped/etc. The way my stairs are in my house, the bottom of the stairs is in a spot where there's about a 270 degree field of exposure. (although I haven't been trained in tactics, it just seems like a terribly bad idea to try and move through a spot where you have to go through that one spot and there's so many places a bad guy could be - edit: I need to get training there, in case I'm ever in a situation where I'm stuck having to do it, but I think even if I had it I would still go by the defend-one-room plan, assuming there are still cops to call, etc - attempting to clear is more risk).

My plan before my CHL class was to use the stairs as a choke point (essentially just defending the upstairs), but the instructor changed my mind about that. My thought has always been that in such a situation (an active intruder in my home) my job is not to be a hero, but to take every advantage I can to up the odds that my family survives unharmed, and he convinced me that defending a single room does that, if we're talking about a situation where it is at all possible. (of course, if I wake up and some intruder is already in my room, things will be different)

[lrpettit]

After talking to many friends and acquaintances, I learned I was the only person in the State of Texas that did not know that fire alarms "wear out" and need to be replaced periodically. I personally learned this lesson about 4:00 am one morning when the only solution was to get a ladder and unplug them throughout the whole house (which was a deafening experience)d. I didn't read your earlier posts close enough to remember which sensor you said was the problem but you might keep my experience in mind.

[CHLLady]

Have no valuable ideas to offer, just wanted to give you a virtual ((((hug)))) and tell you I am so sorry for your loss.

[Waco1959]

...but I haven't been able to find any ammo

Gunbot.net

I think I remember you have a 9mm? I have ordered from Freedom Munitions and had good luck AND they have had 9mm in stock online lately.They also have a store in the Houston area.

Jeff