(courtesy playhickory.com)

“Police say a neighbor used a golf club to stop and disarm a shotgun-wielding man after a home invasion in central Pennsylvania,” pittsburgh.cbslocal.com reports. “Chambersburg police say the neighbor, Keith Giles, used the golf club to knock down 25-year-old Kevyn Rideout as he ran from a home he robbed Friday night.” Mashie niblick, perchance? The report doesn’t specify the club, the par for the hole or the injuries sustained by the perp. All we know is . . .

Police have charged Rideout with using a sawed-off shotgun to rob a 17-year-old boy who lived in the home. Police were alerted to the robbery and arrived to find Rideout down and subdued by Giles, who had also taken the shotgun from Rideout before officers arrived.

I guess the lesson here is simple enough: use what you got. Still, I’d have preferred some shooting iron to a a number eight iron. Just sayin’ . . .

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40 COMMENTS

  2. Adaptation I suppose. The sad thing is there is probably less paperwork than shooting back and no night in jail for beating an attacker/intruder with a golf club.

      • Auto-link. Not sure of the process but a lot of websites auto-link to some words and the link doesn’t have anything to do with the content.

      • I scrub the ads from my comments. Just add an extra space or hyphen, everyone will figure out what you’re saying.

        BTW, I’d prefer a baseball bat if it came down to sports equipment.

    • Grant in IN,

      Golf clubs do have a serious weakness as melee weapons: the shafts are fairly fragile and will break with surprising ease if the head goes beyond the target (meaning that only the shaft hits the target).

  6. We’re not soldiers or cops. For most of us if we have a dgu it will be at bad breath range. At contact range. Even if you’re carrying your gat chances are very good you’ll be fighting hand to hand before you can get it out.

    A contact weapon, bat, tire iron, screwdriver, golf club, etc. has a lot going for it in these moments. Anything you have in your hands at contact range is going to beat the gun in the holster.

    Mindset is much more important than equipment. Our man with the golf club had the proper mindset for winning. Dude with the shotgun had the mindset that since he had a big gun people would be afraid. So he expected people to act in a certain way and when they didn’t he was unable to adapt.

    I go for a daily ruck. Quite often I have a walking stick with me. I do not need a stick to get around. But nobody, including the cops, questions why I need that blunt instrument in my hands.

    • It’s called getting inside the OODA loop and is essential to winning a physical confrontation.

      guy with shotgun wasn’t expecting a fight, believing his threat of force would allow him to dominate the encounter. He wasn’t prepared to respond to aggressive, immediate action.

      I really need to get myself one of those unbreakable umbrellas.

  8. Whats funny is Chambersburg is the county seat of Franklin County PA, which always pops up on the most armed counties in the US list. The school district shuts down for the first day of deer season because attendance would be so low.

    Of course this happened in an area of downtown that has seen property values plummet the last 20 years and most of the people who occupy downtown do not own guns….

  10. Sun Tzu called it death ground.

    Once you’re backed into a corner, what else do you have to lose…

    Note to BG’s: don’t put your victims on death ground… Or do, better yet, do.

    I’d rather see the BG get their ass kicked anyhow.

  12. As in guns, so goes golf…

    I prefer the steel shaft vs the fiberglass or carbon fiber hybrid.
    All metal is more weight, but feels better.
    Add good grips and yer ready to go…

    • Steel does feel better. I feel like I get a idea of exactly how I hit the ball (instant feedback) which gives me more confidence to actually hit the ball instead of tapping it.

      But there I go talking about muh feelz…

  13. I can’t find the original story but I surmise that the owner got behind the BG and clipped him in the head, the BG wasn’t actually prepaired/willing to use his weapon or both.

    Within it’s range a golf club is a pretty wicked weapon. When I was living in Costa Rica a neighbor’s house was robbed. He chased the BG down and hit him in the head with an iron. One shot, lights out. He then drags the guy back to his house and inside the front door. Police show up, look at the blood trail, ignore it and write the whole thing up as legal because they body is inside the house and therefore the BG must have been in the house at the time force was applied. Mr. BG died from a TBI while the cops were on their way (over an hour response time).

    I wondered why more people in CR didn’t shoot BG’s since Costa Rica has pretty lax gun laws. It was explained to me that if you shot someone and they died there was a lot of paperwork. Other forms of lethal force, not so much.

  15. If the robber had a sawed off shotgun*, does that mean he filled out a form 1, had the gun engraved with his trust name and city, and paid his $200 to the ATF? Because if not, it would seem to show the NFA doesn’t keep those extra dangerous guns out of the hands of criminals.

    * Assuming he cut the barrel to under 18″.

    • Pretty sure a sawed off shotgun is just a $5 tax, don’t ask me why. OTOH the excuse for the wild-ass assault on Ruby Ridge was a sawed off shotgun without the tax paid, would be a real bitch if I’m right about the $5.

      • Five bucks and a 6 to 9 or more month wait.

        It is the bargain way to start NFA stamp collecting.

        I’m seriously considering buying a beater side-by-side scattergun to cut down and get my first NFA stamp.

        (Stamp first, then cut)…

  17. Spalding, this calls for the old Billy Baroo. Oh, Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy. Don’t let me down!

  19. A golfer friend of mine claimed that a golf bag manufacturer is now making a golf bag with a separate pocket for a shotgun so a golfer can defend him/herself against the large predators that live in the water hazards (that’s what makes those ponds hazardous, I guess), like this critter:
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MuhmB7r9F2k
    I just don’t think a golf club would be adequate for self defense against that.

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