RF preaches it all the time – home carry. For good reason, too. Google up ‘home invasion‘ and see how many hits you get. And it doesn’t just happen at night, either. Plenty of bad dudes make the assumption that homes are empty during the day when everyone’s at work or school. Call in sick or take a day off and you could be home when someone you don’t know expects otherwise. But while Tuesday’s dustup in the incongruously named Pleasant Hill, Tennessee took place during the day, there seems to be a little more involved than the usual smash and grab job. In this case, everyone involved already knew each other . . .

Whatever may have gone on between the unidentified homeowner and the two guys who broke in and tried to strangle him, the lesson remains the same. According to timesfreepress.com, Mr. Unidentified runs a home-based scrap metal biz and had dealt with Joey Pugh and Jacob Clark before.

The man told police that two men “had forcefully entered his residence and began assaulting him,” (Cumberland County Chief Investigator Casey) Cox said. The homeowner had a .22-caliber pistol in his pocket and managed to get off three shots during the assault, he said.

“It was pretty much a two-on-one,” Cox said. The victim “was being choked and he was able to retrieve his handgun and he fired off three rounds,” he said.

Once again, not a .45, a 9mm or a .38. He had a .22 in his pocket ready to rock and he used it. Pretty effectively as it turns out.

Authorities later found Putnam County resident Jacob Andrew Clark dead of a gunshot wound to his chest a short distance from the home, police said.

Joey Allen Pugh, 18, of Cumberland County, was taken into custody as he fled on foot, according to authorities.

The TBI will undoubtedly dig into this a little more to find out what may have prompted the attack, but for now they think Jake and Joey meant to rob Mr. Unidentified and they’re treating the shoot as a justifiable self defense situation.

Fact: no one likes to get shot. Doesn’t matter if it’s coming from a “pea shooter” .22 or something that starts with a four. And “when you need your gun to defend your life inside your home, you want it right then and there.” You never know when one may come in handy.

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30 COMMENTS

  1. Had he used a service caliber weapon, the taxpayers might have been spared the expense of prosecuting the second dirtbag.

  2. Don’t forget the most (arguably) important thing – motivation.

    These guys wanted some stuff, most likely. They weren’t fighting for their lives, they weren’t hopped up on drugs (that we know of), and they weren’t in an uncontrolled blind rage (I’m assuming this whole deal was set up ahead of time and focused on grabbing stuff).

    .22LR and most other calibers would probably work just fine for this business. When it comes to a hardened con with fairy dust coursing through his system I’d prefer something a little heavier – good news is that 9mm +P HP rounds and up should be more than able to do the trick. (And even at the exorbitant prices some stores charge one case should last the average person a lifetime, barring SHTF scenarios… and in those cases a whole truckload of ammo might not be enough.)

    • Eh… I don’t shoot my carry ammo much, but I still go through it every now and then.

      Ammo, especially ammo that is being carried all the time, does not have an infinite lifetime. Once it gets around 6 months old, I tend to cycle through it. Maybe more if I’m carrying it rarely and OWB, maybe more regularly if I’m pocket carrying it regularly.

      On the whole, I tend to have three magazines loaded for my primary carry piece: One in the gun, one for my side, and a second spare for off-body carry (generally in my bag while I’m at work). When I cycle my carry ammo, my primary spare becomes my secondary spare, and my secondary spare gets fired along with the mag in the gun.

      Given this useage pattern, I’ve used somewhere between 125 and 250 rounds of carry ammo in the year and a half I’ve been carrying. Granted, it hasn’t all been with the same gun (Hell, I keep four guns loaded for carry), but it still only comes in 250 round cases.

  3. You seem to be confused about the mean of a home invasion. An attempted burglury that happens when someone is at home is called “hot.” In the US these are usually the result of a mistake by the BG. He wouldn’t have entered the house if he knew someone was home. A home invasion is deliberate violent takedown of a residence. Home invasions are usually criminal on criminal violence (or a mistake by your local SWAT.)

    Why is this distinction important? Most BGs who make a mistake beat feet even you don’t brandish a weapon because hanging around increases their chances of getting IDed and caught. In home invasion scenario you the BGs are coming for you. You have a much greater chance of getting Zimmermaned if you shoot the former than if you take out the latter.

    • Because it is surprisingly easy to kick down a door with a dead bolt, or pry off/kick in window bars. Gun safes are harder to break in to than a home, but go on youtube and you can see videos of people breaking them open in under a minute. And most people can’t afford a vault door and bullet proof windows, and even then they could always force their way in by driving a car thru a wall.

    • As the saying goes, locks keep honest people honest. Most household deadbolted doors will not hold up to one or two good, solid kicks, because they are frequently fired into nothing more than a hole drilled in the wood frame with a cosmetic metal strike plate over it. The deadbolt doesn’t fail, the door frame does, allowing the deadbolt pocket to just rip right out.

      One way to help prevent this from happening is installing a pocket under the cosmetic strike plate, similar to the ones seen in this picture. The one that came with my deadbolt has three screw holes: two in the conventional locations and one in the very bottom of the pocket. I fired three 3″ screws into the surrounding wood frame through those holes, and between that and replacing the 1″ hinge screws with 2 1/2″ inchers, I’m confident my front door would stand up to the “two solid kick” test, which is the worst I’m reasonably concerned with around here.

    • Because most “security professionals” (read as “cops and retired cops”) keep telling us that if the bad guys can’t get in through the doors, they’ll get in through the windows. So contractors, et al, build non-secure houses. The door locks are shoddy, the deadbolts are a joke, locksets are feeble, etc – because to make a door that can’t be kicked in costs more, yet it can’t be seen. And heaven knows, there’s nothing the building industry hates more than something that costs more that isn’t seen.

      If you want a door that can’t be kicked in, you need to start clear out at the frame-in for the door, not the door jam. Then you need a thick door, four hinges, three deadbolts into steel pockets that are anchored into the framing around the door jam, etc.

      But the larger issue people should see is this: Cops (and retired cops posing as “security experts”) are the worst possible sources of “expertise” on home and personal security. For years, cops told us to not resist when confronted by criminals. They told us that we didn’t need to own guns. They told us we didn’t need to carry guns concealed. See a pattern here?

  5. the best words ever spoken were:

    I had my gun in my hand, just when I needed it!

    Not, oh my gosh golly Mr. doorbuster, will you kindly have a spot of tea whilst I unlock my gun safe, pull the trigger lock off, load it, cock it, and point at you so we can then continue?

    My shotgun sling attached to my 18″ pistol grip mossy helps a great deal in keeping it handy and if I do not feel like to carry that around then I have my 45. revolver in my shoulder holster ON ME AT ALL TIMES.

    what more do you need than a 12. ga with hot loads and a 45. with 250+ grain bullets in it?

  6. I work for an environmental group and most of my job involved going door-to-door. As I’ve been doing I watch everyone reaction and how secure their home is. Yesterday I was at someone’s house that had a sign reading “Uninvited guests in this house will be shot.” The next house had his front door open while he was off in the back of the house. A few doors later, a guy yelled at me from the dining room to come in without looking at who I was.
    What I’m saying is that as important home carry is, a lot of people ignore the importance of locking their door, closing their door, or being more weary when pulling their wallet out in front of a complete stranger.

  8. At-home burglaries alone are very rare. Actual Home invasions are slightly more common than Great White shark attacks…

    And this I suspect is something more. The homeowner “operated a scrap metal business from his house” and “had done business with the pair in the past”. (Although other reports say home jewelry business, but its probably in the same category because I doubt these two were buyers of jewelry)

    Although probably justifiable even so, I’d suspect that the homeowner’s scrap metal business isn’t very particular about where his clients get their copper/gold from, and that these two were drug-abusers who tried to graduate from theft to strong-arm robbery.

    Which says the lesson is more likely to be “If you do regular business with tweakers, keep a gun in your pocket”

    • “Actual Home invasions are slightly more common than Great White shark attacks…”

      I disagree strongly. I lived in Madison WI for 30+ years, moved a year ago. The last few years there, there were weekly to monthly reports of home invasions of elderly people in their homes, at times of night (8 – 10 pm).

      This is a city everybody likes to tell themselves is “low crime.” I’m in a “low crime” area now, looking for a good shower carry gun.

  9. I said it before and I’ll say it again. If you hit major arteries and/or organs, then it won’t matter if you use a .22 LR or a .500 Magnum, the bad guy’s going down fast. It wasn’t a big sexy pistol and the guy didn’t fly across the room after being shot by Dirty Harry but the bad guy got dead in short order.

    I don’t know if I’d trust a .22LR from a supa short barrel to reliably make it through a bad guys clothing, skin, fat, muscle, ligament, bone, and then into organs and arteries but, if it can then it can obviously do the trick. I’ll stick with my G17 and 147 Buffalo Bore JHP and Critical Defense in my LC9.

    That’s my $.02 anyway.

    • I agree.

      In this shooting the bad guy took two or three .22LR bullets that convinced him to stop and run away. Then he died somewhere outside the house.

      My self-defense ammo is .45ACP 230grain +P black talons (Winchester Ranger Talons). If I need to shoot, I want every bullet to make the biggest nastiest wound channel possible. I don’t shoot with the hope that it will convince the bad guy to stop and run away, because sometimes that doesn’t work. I shoot to force the bad guy to stop.

      • I agree with you Bob, big holes are better than small holes, but small holes are better than no holes at all due to being unarmed.

  10. I’ve got a 18 shot 22 semi auto rifle I keep loaded with CCI stingers or HV mini mag hollow points. I wouldn’t want to get hit with either round.

  11. .22lr rounds will work, but the margin for aiming error becomes much smaller. 12 gauge shells gives you more ” slop”.

  12. A 22lr will certainly kill. After all it’s what gator hunters typically use to dispatch some near half ton lizards during hunting season in Louisiana. But the point is a defensive round is not intended to kill, it’s intended to stop. And that further devolves into two scenario’s as has already been pointed out: a B&E gone bad, or an intentional attack on a homeowner. In the first case the possibility of an armed resident will get them running, and the sound of a .22 shot will have them soiling themselves. In the second case you need significant trauma to center mass, or a precision shot to one of several vulnerable body points to effectively discourage the attacker. Thus the commonly held belief that I totally agree with, carry the most gun that you can shoot effectively and more importantly will always have with you.

  13. I read (can’t remember where though) that home invasions are more common than home fires.
    Does spymyeyes carry a PGO 12 ga at home? No criticism from me, but that seems inconvenient. My fusil de maison holds 8 and is ready to go, but like I sid it’s too inconvenient to carry around all day.
    If Ben Eli knocked on my door he would see me open the door with one hand behind my butt after I had looked through the window next to the door.

  15. Across the street from my dad’s grocery was a meat locker. Their slaughter house was in the back of the operation and provided the only entertainment the very small town had other than the pool hall (snooker only, thank you). We learned early how to kill, dress, break down, and butcher beef and pork. We never heard of PETA and if we had we would have assumed it was a bread product. All of the steers, cows, and hogs were dispatched with a .22 rifle. Shot placement, folks, is everything.

  16. I’ll take the 15 rounds of Federal Permium JHP Hydra-Shok at 124gr in my Gen4 G19 any day over .22LR. I live in a neiborhood were people leave their garage door open overnight and this after a rash of bike thefts. I doubt a home invasion in the area will change their ways.

  17. You must hae a gun on your person in order to save your life and others.The constant banter about which caliber is better is menaingless, your 45 does no good in the safe or nightstand. Having bee a victim of a home invasion, I can tell you that having a gun in a holster is the only thing that “may” save you. I carry 24/7. It takes a second or two for them to get in, you won’t havetime to put that elaborate plan you dreamt up into effect. You have to be able to shoot them as they enter.

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