So let’s discuss the issue of the Best Handgun for Home Security. It’s a topic that I guarantee has kept many fathers up late at night, wondering how they fulfill their paternal duty. It’s your job to protect your household from whatever trouble may befall it, and if you are lucky enough to live in a place where guns are alright to defend your home in the event of an attack (sorry California), a handgun is one of your best options for doing so.
But selecting that individual gun model isn’t quite as important as keeping the right mindset and practices in place for storing and using your firearm. You can find our other article about the best handgun for home defense, for that reference. To put it simply, any gun that goes “bang” will work to defend your home, but obviously, home defense is more than that. So let’s go over the characteristics of what makes the best handgun for home security.
Easiest to Get
The handgun that will defend your family the best is the one that is easiest for you to get to from bed. It does no good if you have to get up, run downstairs, fiddle with the combination wheel on your massive gun safe, get your shotgun, run back upstairs, and hope that something bad hasn’t already happened. Ideally, the Best Handgun for Home Security is right there at your bedside, ready at a moment’s notice.
Obviously, you want to keep this gun properly locked up (Best Handgun Safe) to make sure nothing happens to it. I personally keep a handgun right next to my bed, locked in a manual button combination V-Line Pistol Safe. I prefer the manual open over the biometric or electronic safes for pure reliability issues. If the electronics are down, the batteries are dead, or anything else wrong happens, you can’t access your gun. With the combination safes, it’s literally second nature to enter the combination and retrieve the firearm.
Can be Used in High-Stress Situations?
So this is a characteristic that has multiple sub-points to discuss.
It’s said that –
“In a stressful situation, expect to shoot less than 1/2 as well as you do on a good day at the range”
Defending your home is probably the most high-stress situation I could think of. For this reason, your heart will be pounding, confusion will set in, and in the end, your shooting will be off.
Comfortable With
First and foremost, you need to be completely comfortable with the gun you’re going to be shooting. This means that holding your gun, going through the basic operations and more should be like twiddling your thumbs. It needs to be so second nature that you don’t need to think about it, because you really won’t have time to. So properly unload and check your gun, then just spend some time while sitting on the couch cycling through functions, and really making that gun feel like it’s attached to your hand.
We left off partway through describing how your handgun needs to be able to be used in high-stress situations.
Night Compatible
The Best Handgun for Home Security also needs to be one that is easy to use at night. This could mean a few different things, but the most common outlets would be fluorescent/glowing night sights or attached lasers or flashlights. Either one of those is really not that expensive to implement, but could mean the world when going toe-to-toe with a home invader in the pitch black.
For Handgun Night Sights check out the TruGlo Handgun Sights.
For Handgun Lasers, check out the Crimson Trace Laser Grips.
For a good Handgun Light, check out the SureFire LED Handgun Light.
Simple Operation
This will be partially covered again later, but your handgun needs to be very simple and easy to operate. I really don’t like the handguns with 1,000 little buttons, unlocks, and more just to get the weapon into a loaded state. In a high-stress situation, you will have absolutely NO time for that and want a weapon as simple as possible. Open your safe, grab your gun, and be ready to go. No, doing slide unlocks, figuring out if the safety is on or not, etc. I’d hope you don’t have one of those ridiculous magazine cable locks or a lockable gun that you’d have to mess with before being able to use.
Shot-Shell Preferred
Like I said before, your accuracy goes down immensely in high-stress situations, so having a larger margin for error is a good thing. For this reason, guns like the Taurus Judge and the Smith and Wesson Governor are very cool. They are able to load .410 shotshell as well as .45 bullets (both .45 ACP and .45 Colt). That would allow you to have a close-quarters gun with a shotgun-like effect as the round spreads out of the barrel. Now, this isn’t completely ideal in all home invasion situations because of how much the shot can spread and collateral damage, but it can be really nice to be able to just point and shoot, and know that you’ll at least wound the assailant.
Will Fire when you pull the trigger
Although this sounds like a simple idea, many guns really don’t keep this in mind. The best handgun for home security is one that will FIRE when you pull the TRIGGER. This means not having to fiddle with multiple safety unlocks, slide locks or anything like that before your weapon is in the loaded and ready state.
That brings me to another point – your firearm should be loaded and chambered while in home defense storage. I know some people will say different things when it comes to this, but I believe that if your gun is properly locked up, there is no danger in this.
As you probably already know, I’m a huge fan of Glocks, and they really excel in this area. Their unique trigger safety means that as long as there is a round chambered, you can pull the trigger and your gun will fire. Revolvers are the same thing when in double-action mode. As long as there are rounds in your gun, it will fire when you pull the trigger.
What Handgun is best for home Defence?
So in the end, the Best Handgun for Home Security is one that is the easiest to get to, can use in high-stress situations, and will fire when you pull the trigger. It’s as simple as that.