After Action Review

I have trouble second guessing you because I wasn't there, I had a similar problem a year ago and would do a few things differently next time.

Around 2AM I had a car pull up in my drive and shut off the lights. I am slso on a country road far from town with the same long police response time. We have a neighborhood along the river and there are sporatic homes along the road but many of them are weekend cabins. There are no lights on in or around my house. I also had a guy living down the road who was suspected of selling Meth.

I heard the car and got up to investigate with gun in hand. I opened my garage door and the automatic light came on. The car load of young men drove off and left the area.

Next time I will do it differently. I will slip out my back door and take cover at the side of my house where they can't see me. I will have my wife call the sheriff and get them rolling. They have nothing else to do and should enjoy the call. I will wait and only confront them once they move on my house. Going to the car and them seeing me in the open would be a bad idea because they would have the advantage.

Taking down a drunk driver is better left to the police. The fact that you saw him behind the wheel even if he passes out after being stopped is enough to arrest the driver. If the driver should move there is a good chance he could be seen by the sheriff who should have been called immediately. The problem is you don't know what you have when you approach the vehicle. It could be a drunk, out of control man juiced up on meth, a burglar, or even a hit man wanting to take you our. Oops, I guess I did second guess.
 
Well, I didn't want to look like a noob bumping his own thread but.....
ArizonaTRex, that there is the funniest comment I think I've ever read!
I laughed so hard I think I stained something when I read it.
I am ornery, no doubt,how dangerous is a matter of perception :)
 
Just a point, do you have neighbors? ones you trust?


One night I found a car in my yard, no one in it, just a car parked against a tree. no air bags deployed, no visible damage, but a car against the tree, motor running..... Wife was home, she was on phone to police, I Called the good neighbor and said I need some help, he was outside in 3 minutes with a gun, a flashlight, and his wife on 911 telling them to get a move on in a way my wife is uncomfortable doing...When we finally located the driver, he was almost ready to give me a hard time when he saw the other neighbor and two guns, he decided to just sit on the grass and **** himself.

BUT what I learnd was neighbor was ready to cover my back very quickly when I needed it. It was, and is, a comforting idea.
 
A note about the light

Just a quick observation. Flashing your light from the porch with no cover immediately and clearly reveals your position. Especially with something dim like a mag-light.
Take a look at a flashlight from a distance at night. Think you could shoot the person holding it?

Other than that I admire your sense of responsibility and compassion to keep an idiot from killing himself or others.
 
Gotta comment on one thing ... jrothWA's potato idea is nuts!!! No offense, but getting behind a car with an unknown person in the driver's seat is such a bad idea, I don't even know where to start. Jeez ... Besides, if he drives away, you win. Why would you NOT want to let him go?

I would NOT have gone outside. The police are closer here (maybe 10 minutes away) and I would have called them, turned the outside lights on to avoid backlighting and kept the car under observation. I would have been armed. If the person in the car is hurt, that's a problem -- for them. But there's no way to know that without putting yourself in serious harm's way; your first job is to make sure YOU and YOURS survive the encounter; staying inside makes that most likely.
 
I would have to say that it sounds like it played out well:
Nice alert status, good threat assessment and good danger assessment. You had a good command of the situation, and used your equipment well.
I can't say the driver ceased to be a threat, as his motivations were still unclear; But, He still had control of a deadly weapon and was a threat to the public. In some states that would be justification for a legal shoot. I think your solution was fine.
A couple of short blasts from the flashlight to the eyes will take his night vision away for a few seconds.
 
take a potato with you, the shove it up the exhaust.
No way will the car start.
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IIRC, those good folks at Mythbusters recentlybusted that idea.

For the OP, I'm with the stay-inside crowd, or at least go back inside after you found out nobody was hurt.
 
I can't say that I would have done anything different. I will ask this however, what did you plan on doing if he didn't comply with your requests and just got in his car and drove off? I mean would you have attempted to restrain him forcefully? tried to talk him down? what?
 
Code: 
what did you plan on doing if he didn't comply with your requests and just got in his car and drove off? I mean would you have attempted to restrain him forcefully? tried to talk him down? what?/CODE]

Rest assured that I gamed all possible actions in my head, including my response and subsequent outcomes. That said, i would be a fool to admit publicly what my theoretical response would be to theoretical actions.
I will say that the likelihood of this individual driving off was next to nothing. I have a fairly steep driveway with some curves. One side has a stone wall and one side has a drop off of about 3 feet to lawn. In the last 8 years we have had probably 2 people a year go off the drop or scrape the wall, and all of these were [U]sober[/U] and most during daylight (using your mirrors to back up is a dying art :) ) Like I said, the odds were against him getting much more than 30 feet.
 
3 The crossed wrist, mag light & weapon hold. (sorry, don't know the term) was incredibly strange. My watch was in the way, I kept fidgeting etc... I now know that I need to take my mag light to the range, assume this position and actually practice firing from this position.
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It's called the Harrie's position. Yes, it is hard to maintain for any period of time. It is even harder to shoot accurately and control the recoil.

fightlight02.jpg


Gabe Suarez suggests a modification of this position, with your hands held in more of an X. That is, instead of having your right arm straight and your left bent, bend both of them, with the handgun being slightly canted to the left.

Yes, you really do have to train with it on the range, because it really is different.

As for the AAR, I'm in the "call the police and watch from behind a locked door" crowd. But I'm in the suburbs with a sub-5 minute police response time. I'm also nearing 50 and have never been in the kind of shape to be an 11B (thank you for your service, by the way). So the last thing I want to do is get within wrestling distance of a drunk. YMMV.
 
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