I have had numerous recent requests for advice on home defense. In this article I will speak largely from experience as someone who has managed to ward off numerous attempts by criminals to gain entry by force into my home or a place of business I was charged with defending. By no means am I an expert on this subject. However, I’ve held off aggressors at my own front door with blades, extension weapons and firearms. So take this experience-based advice and find some apocalypse pantry author online who specializes in domestic security tactics and combine these information resources to fit your needs.

For instance, if you are a rancher near Juarez, it is already the End of Days and past time to work out your fields of fire. But if you are Joe Bohemian grooving in your ghetto flat, law enforcement’s concern with making certain you are harmless to cops—and hence to criminals—and municipal statutes intended to discourage gangland firearms use will hinder your ability to effectively defend yourself without putting yourself at grave legal risk.

Most people, when they think of home defense, think of firearms. I do not. Firstly, this is because I am not qualified with any firearms and have never been a decent shot as my hands have always been unusually shaky. My bother, the best shot in his company in the 82nd Airborne, once hit me and cussed me out at a firing range for embarrassing him in front of the assembled rednecks when I missed by unthinkable margins.

The other reason why I have no desire to employ firearms is because any use of a firearm, particularly in an urban municipality, will immediately bring legal heat, even if you are a cop. I’d rather fight a gang of home invaders with my gladius and cargo-hook than be persecuted by lawyers that spent eight years and a small fortune to learn how to get me convicted.

When I was a nut-job urban survivalist being threatened by armed criminals on a daily basis in the mid-1990s, I did carry a 20-gauge shotgun on the street on two occasions, and also totted an illegally modified carbine. The stress was too much though. I calculated that I was more likely to become the workload of some cop who was just trying to do his job than to draw down on a street thug. I got rid of my firearms in 1999, preferring the possibility of becoming nothing but a knife wielding meat-shield when my house got overrun, to the stress of repeatedly breaking such a taboo law.

To begin with, I never liked the idea of using my guns for home defense and instead used them as portable deterrents on the street and to drive invaders off my property before they entered the house. Once my oldest son was a teenager I would not even consider using a firearm for home defense because of the possibility of popping him or a friend coming home late at night. There was also the example of the local business owner who shot at an armed robber only to have the slug pass through the wall and kill the pizza maker next door.

Again, as an able bodied man, I saw no reason to take a chance on one of my bullets taking out one of my family in another room. I once roomed with a guy who was walking back upstairs, all shaken up after he had repelled a home invader with his .22 caliber magnum revolver at the front door while I was loading my twenty gauge with buckshot upstairs. On the way up the stairs, his jittery legs locked up and he tripped, discharging the gun and almost killing our cat, who literally flew across the room in a ball of furry fright.

I gave my guns away, and committed myself to the home defense course of taking a bullet while I ran someone through. A terrible marksmen I might be, but I still take out young knife fighters with a five-foot pronated lunge on occasion—in fact did it last night. The house I live in is a maze of corridors, doorways and small rooms, perfect for big blades. The belief that a blade can’t work against a gun in close quarters is just like the 1970s karate belief that punching can’t work against kicking and grappling can’t work against punching. You just need to be willing to pay the price to get into your range. When I was 18 I saw news footage of one of Anwar Sadat’s assassins being run through with a parade sword—much to my grandfather’s delight—and I was sold.

But that is all just my personal preference; my home defense bias. Your situation, perhaps a rural location, squeamishness, an infirmity, or the fact that you are female, might call for a firearm. In such a case I can give no technical advice, only half-baked bias. But there is no shortage of gun-nuts to aid you if you choose that course.

Keep in mind, that whatever weapon you choose for home defense, that its use carries an inherent legal liability.

You have no right in most municipalities to use any force beyond control grappling to protect your property. If you are outside of your car and someone is trying to break in, and you do the same thing to them with a tire-iron that they are doing to your car window with that flashlight than you have committed a violent crime, and they have only committed a property crime. If you have a child or spouse in the car, then you can claim to have been going to their rescue, but will be called upon to prove it. Also, if you are in the car, you may claim that you thought you were defending against a carjacking or kidnapping and try to justify your use of force that way.

Do not advance from your house to meet an aggressor unless you are doing so to protect a child, spouse or other dependent who is outside. In 2002 I was in my living room waiting for my son to come home from school while I taped up a sparring stick. I heard the sound of a foot pursuit nearing the house, so darted outside with the stick in hand in nothing but a pair of cut off jeans. As I emerged my son and his friend were leaping headfirst over the fence as four older boys pursued them. I leaped the fence to meet the attack just as one of the boys hit the fence and pushed away, mumbling to the other aggressors, “Shit, yo, fuckin’ Tarzan en shit!”

I paced up and down the sidewalk until they were out of sight, while my son rooted in the shed and found a steel pipe in case he needed to reinforce me. My actions may seem justified but could have gotten me in big trouble. If cops would have showed up then I might have been arrested. If I had hit one of those kids with that stick I would have been charged. At that time I was working in the city at night before coming back out to this suburban peninsula, and had brought that combative ghetto mentality home with me. I crossed the line when I hopped the fence. If my son and his friend had made it inside I would have crossed that legal liability line when I left the house.

You may not defend property. If you have no dependents in the yard or driveway you must retreat into the house, and may not advance from it except at great legal peril.