Home Defense Weapons and Safe Backstops
Rob PincusDescription
During a lethal-force encounter inside your home with home defense weapons, you don’t want to hit a family member or other innocent people. It’s important to learn which objects in your home make safe backstops and which will not stop a round that’s been fired. Rob Pincus fires a pistol, carbine and shotgun at a stack of books to help evaluate their effectiveness as backstops.
To learn more about the different types of guns for home defense read our article on the best home defense weapons.
What you just saw was exactly what I would see if I was barricaded in that doorway, the most likely spot in this home to be the last place that I would need to be, if I were on the phone with the police, family behind me, firearm in hand, hoping that no one was going to come through that door. If that person did come through this door and I identified them as a lethal threat, this is the exact angle that I would probably be able to engage them at first with a live fire firearm. As you can see from that angle, there's a kids bedroom on the other side. If I wasn't able to get the family behind me, and if I were to shoot at a person at this angle and miss or push through them, I would need a safe backstop here, and that doesn't necessarily mean armor plating. Books can make a great backstop. You can arrange the books to cover almost every square surface area of the likely angles that you're going to be shooting that would result in a potential pass through of that wall and result in an angle that might hit a child in that bed or in that room. Of course if the angle gets steeper and we go further this way, I'm more likely to hit the outside wall of that other bedroom, not go into that area. If I were to shoot high, I'm not worried about hitting. If I were to shoot low, I'm not worried about hitting that bed. It's a very specific angle, and a very specific place that you'd want to be filling up with books. Will these stop bullets? Let's test the theory at the range. Let's take a look at the Winchester 9mm PDX1 round, this is a typical round that I would carry for self defense and have available for home defense. What we've done here is tape these books up just like they would be on a bookshelf, instead of having them loose and worried about them twisting or moving around. If they're on the bookshelf, they're going to be held together like this. Now I can pull out this center piece here, and we can see that this was the book that took the round. It obviously deflected the round to the side, it popped out of the side, and then it came over here and stopped in this second book. If we take a look over here, you can see that there's absolutely nothing in the target. Now even if that were to have torn through a little bit more, remember, we've still got the drywall, we've still got whatever's on the other side of the wall. This isn't a 100 percent solution, but here with a typical pistol defense round, we see that the books did stop the bullet. Let's take a look at the Winchester PDX1 round, this is 60 grain round, this is a great home defense round also, through our bookshelf. We saw a lot more energy transferred that time. Now obviously there's much more of a disaster down here when it comes to what happened to the books. But at the same time, we realize that these books would be on a bookshelf and would be completely contained. Now here's where we see the bullet made its entry into this book, it got deflected, it got torn apart, it came out the side, and went into the side of one of these other books. And we can see here where it went into the side, and it's contained as we look through here, inside this book, we see a lot of different shrapnel and fragments. Now that's exactly the kind of performance that I would expect out of a home defense type of .223 round that you might have in this carbine, and again, nothing even went into the drywall, which is what this piece of paper is representing, let alone went into the next room. Now we're going to take a look at a 20-gauge shotgun into our simulated bookshelf. This is a buckshot load... and we saw a lot of energy going into these books. In fact, I'm gonna go downrange and grab the books that took the rounds. And, as you can see, the majority of the pellets went right through here. We have a lot of little damage there, we have some damage into this book which is right next to this one, but nothing exited. While the energy took the books and threw them against the wall that we simulated, no pellets that actually came through the books and went into our drywall or simulated next room.
I really appreciate the foresight and expertise of the PDN network team and your thorough examples and demonstrations. Excellent video and additional ideas for my home.
Very insightful thanks.
Oops tightly stacked
I just wanted to say that yes this works and having the books stacked tighly on a book shelf only improves the stopping power This is how we practiced in the basement When Dad was training us as children and we tested it with all kinds of guns it's cool
Interesting idea, and one I hadn't thought about. With a child at home, keeping her safe should there ever be a need for me to fire within the home has been on my mind. With this video, I now have an idea of something I can do to mitigate any chance of her being injured while I try to protect her. Thanks to the PDN crew for putting this out there.
Great video, Rob........
Very well put together video. I do think that this will help non gun people put their minds at ease when it shows that there is a preventative measure that they can do to possibly help protect their family and their own lives.
as someone said earlier you need to stop the books from moving back. one more thing. how much bullet proofing would there be if you filled the walls with paper say phone books. it would seem to me that the safe room should have some sort of bullet resistance walls. that would certainly make the safe room safer. living alone in an old house with solid brick walls my safe room is my house, my front porch has fire wood stack up 3 feet, but i always wonder about bullets traveling the spaces between pieces. also have the piece of wood become a projectile. of course the further down the stack the more pressure to hold the wood in place.
Thank you for a much needed answer to a nagging question. Now if I could just magically make the 1200 plus books I have on my Kindle appear on my walls when needed :0)
Very interesting video! Provides direction for positioning books where needed for protection from penetration. Thanks Rob...