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Monday, February 23, 2004
Rama: Defending the home (part 1)
By KARLON N. RAMA
STAGE FIVE
WHILE the concept of armed home defense may be foreign to a lot of non-shooters, every homeowner recognizes the paramount need to secure their lives, the lives of their loved ones and their rights over their properties from criminal elements.
Thus, when I wrote about the Mossberg Maverick 88 12-guage shotgun that Front Sight Gun Club president Adrian Tadena and I tested a week ago, and why I got one for home defense purposes, I immediately realized that this was a topic appropriate to sport-shooters, gun hobbyists, firearm enthusiasts and non-shooters alike.
Burglars, like the ones who broke into the house of lawyer Ann Militante last Feb. 7, strike two to three Cebu City households each week.
However, less than a third of the number of burglary incidents reported to the CCPO ever gets solved.
Of the over 300 burglary incidents reported to the CCPO from 2001 to the third quarter of 2003, for example, only 96 reached the Regional Trial Court (RTC) as formal criminal cases. Based on RTC records, of the 96 reported cases, 16 involved the beating up of the homeowner who unfortunately detected the burglary about to be committed but had no means of protecting himself or his property.
According to the same records, another six house break-ins led to the murder of the homeowner. Two others, meanwhile, involved the rape of one of the victims.
Helpless. C/Insp. Narciso Ouano, head of CCPO Theft and Robbery Section, said three or four suspected syndicates operate in Cebu City but a larger number of smaller groups pull independent jobs.
Confronted with the RTC figures, he admitted that the police, already swamped with the number of petty thefts, robberies and snatchings that occur daily, cannot cope with the ever-increasing incidents of burglaries.
He acknowledged that there might be burglary incidents that do not even reach the police.
In a 1995 Metro Manila survey conducted by the PNP Crime Prevention and Coordination Service in sample barangays, for example, it was noted that burglary was the second most prevalent crime against property in the country but, of 808 incidents studied, only 262 were reported to the police.
Among the reasons for the non-reporting was the general perception that the stolen items cannot be recovered and that the police cannot identify the perpetrators anyway.
Ouano maintained that while they’ve been able to crack down on a couple of groups here in Cebu City. These haven’t been sufficient enough to deter the remaining groups from victimizing other people.
Last Dec.18, for example, a group of still unidentified men broke into the house of Provincial Board (PB) Member Michael Miranda and carted away a still undisclosed sum of cash and valuables. Interviewed in this paper, Miranda admitted that he didn’t have the incident reported to the police because he felt it was “useless” to do so and that the stolen items won’t be recovered anyway.
Just a couple of months before Miranda was victimized, another group of still unidentified men tried to enter Cebu City Councilor Gerry Carrillo’s home in Barangay Talamban.
In an interview, Carrillo said the police took over 20 minutes to arrive when, in fact, his house is just two minutes away from the Talamban Police Station.
Do it yourself. According to Ouano, the very nature of burglaries precludes the police from doing anything beyond investigating such incidents after it had already happened. He maintained that home-owners themselves, through the adoption of home defense concepts, must be at the forefront if they want to deter criminal elements from ever breaking into their homes.
Home defense does not directly require keeping firearms in the house although armed readiness is considered a necessary condition to absolute security.
In his book Responsible Gun Ownership, Police Chief Inspector and International Range Office Noni Poliquit discussed the framework of home defense as maintaining three sections of security – the border of public property, the perimeter and the safe room.
The public border refers to the space between any point and the outside of your perimeter. The perimeter, meanwhile, is the space between what is beyond your public border into what is outside the walls of your house. The safe room is the area between the inside of your house to the outside of your bedroom door.
(February 23, 2004 issue)
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