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mamabearCali wrote:... just need to find a way to communicate a bit better I guess.

Charles L. Cotton wrote:Target identification is critical whether the defensive strike is with a gun or a fist. Quite some time ago I wrote a post describing a time in my teens when my father and I staked each other around our home, each believing the other was out of town. It ended with the muzzles of our guns against the other's nose and neither of us fired.

The facts you describe created the proverbial "perfect storm," and there isn't much you can do about it, except to learn from the experience. Your husband can take more away from this than you and I'm not faulting him for a normal reaction. But we must recognize that a "normal" response can nevertheless be tragic.

Chas.

Charles L. Cotton wrote:I saw a post this morning on PDO about a father whose 10 year old son made him think there was an intruder in the home. It had a good outcome and it reminded me of something that happen when I was a teenager. This isn't really a "Never Again" story, but one that shows the importance of identifying your target, even when you are scared stiff. It's also a good example how some accidents often are a chain of events.

My mother died when I was 18. I was still living at home with my Dad while going to the University of Houston. I had been dating a girl that lived the next street over, but her father was transferred to Corpus Christi. I drove to see her every other weekend leaving on Friday evening after I got off work.

On one exciting weekend, I drove to Corpus Friday night and my Dad went to our weekend home in Montgomery County. It took about ½ hour for my girlfriend and I to get into an argument, so I drove back home arriving about 1:30 AM. We had a over-sized two car garage, but one side was used as a shop and my Dad kept his truck in the other side. My car stayed in the driveway. Since Dad was gone, I decided to put my car in the garage.

Dad had heart trouble and during the late evening or early morning hours Saturday he started feeling pretty bad. He decided it would be better to go back to Houston, rather than be alone in the piney woods. When he got home about 2:30 AM, he felt so bad he didn't put his truck in the garage. He came in the back door (sliding glass door on patio) and the noise woke me up. I jumped out of bed, open a drawer, took out a 1911 and racked the slide. Dad heard this and drew his S&W Model 19 from his belt. For the next 2 or 3 minutes (seemed like hours) he and I stalked each other through the house. We finally met rounding a corner with each of our pistols literally pointing at each other's noses. Neither of us fired, both of us turned even whiter, and it took over an hour for the adrenalin dump to subside and our knees to stop shaking.

In aviation, it is known that most accidents are not caused by a single failure or event, but a chain of errors or failures. There were no errors made in this story (other than our decision to search the house - more on that later), but there was clearly a chain of events that made it possible. What are the chances that I would get into an argument with my girlfriend on the same day that my Dad got so sick he had to come home? And what about the odds of me deciding to use the garage (something I never did) and Dad not trying to put his prized truck in its normal spot? In Dad's mind I was 220 miles away in Corpus and there was no Mustang in the driveway to indicate otherwise. In my mind, it couldn't be Dad because we always announced our arrival when we came in late and he would have known I was home when he tried to put his truck in the garage. None of our decisions were wrong, but they certainly could have had tragic results. As to whether we should have done our own house clearing, this was 1968 and no God-fearing Texan was going to ask for help when we could do it ourselves! Wise? Probably not. Would I do anything different today? Probably not. (At least I'm consistent.)

That night taught me that 1) I can perform responsibly even when scared to death; 2) no matter how convinced I may be that a certain situation exists, I may be wrong; and 3) "target identification" is not merely an esoteric concept to ponder, it is an indispensable step that can prevent a tragedy from which most of us would never fully recover.

I had been taught from a very early age to identify your target before shooting, whether hunting or firing in self-defense. Very few things in life are worse than getting shot, but killing a loved one by mistake is certainly one of those few.

Regards,
Chas.

AJ80 wrote:One thing to keep in mind is that a mans brain isn't as able to focus on multiple things as well as a womans. So if you do tell him that you're going downstairs or something similar and his attention is on something else, even if he responds, he may have no memory of it at all.

So if you want to make sure, it may take a bit more conversation to completely get his mind focused on the fact that you are going down stairs.