Chainsaw Ripping Through the Door

I read about this wrong house raid incident last night, and I have to agree with SayUncle on this one:

Using a chainsaw seems to me to be unnecessarily dangerous and doesn’t lend itself to stealth. Also, if I were sitting around my house and I saw and heard a chainsaw coming through the door, my first thought will not be it’s the police and I should cooperate.

Yeah, I would not think someone chainsawing my door is the cops. Then again, it would have to be an awfully stupid prowler too, considering how much noise that makes.

15 thoughts on “Chainsaw Ripping Through the Door”

  1. What caliber for defending against chainsaw entry?

    I would be inclined to go with multiple magazines (I have a Saiga) of 12-guage 1 oz slugs fired through the door before it was breached. Then back up that up with the AR-15 loaded with SS-109 if anyone exposed themselves through the openings.

    1. @Joe Huffman –

      You read my mind. I was thinking through this scenario in a WTBGU style and thought “dump a mag out of the 1911 on my hip while retreating upstairs then fetch the AR loaded with 62gr penetrators”.

  2. Yeah the use of the chainsaw certainly comes off as being more aggressive, I can’t imagine why they think it’s a good idea to scare the crap out of someone like that. Would they even be able to hear them shouting ‘POLICE!’?

    1. That’s what I’m thinking. This is making me realize the value of a good strong bedroom door. If there are people breaking down my door saying they are cops, I want time to verify this with 911. The wrong door thing, I get that it happens, but it seems to happen a lot.

      The reason I’d be skeptical is because a) there have been cases of home invaders pretending to be cops to throw off the homeowners. b) the police have no reason to be knocking down my door, and c) if they are, in fact, home invaders claiming to be police, they are likely extremely violent individuals, since they know someone is home and don’t intend to be stealthy about it.

      Cops need to be really really careful they get the right house. Legally, in my opinion, if they break down the wrong door and get shot, that should be too bad. But you know the homeowner would go down for it.

      1. Interestingly enough, I posed this question to our local States Attorney during a gun law lecture he gave last year. He stated that if you shoot a cop who has entered your house unlawfully (i.e. wrong address, etc.) then you have every legal right to defend yourself.

        Didn’t think to get that in writing, but it was refreshing to hear him say so.

  3. See this is how my brain works….hmm…police are using chainsaw. Soon criminals will start doing it too.

    Not only do I want a strong door. But which has an interior filled up with goop & fibers. That way, shortly after starting to cut the chainsaw will be quickly incapacitated.

    Giving you enough time to fire several slugs through your door into the home invaders.

  4. Of course, these guys have the budget for NIJ Level IV armor, so unless you’ve got an automatic or IEDs at the doorway you’re not going to stand much chance.
    The big mistake most people make is contesting entry (like poor Jose Guerena). Have a fallback safe room you can reach, ideally the one your family spends the most time in.
    Two front doors wouldn’t be a bad idea, either, especially if the interior one isn’t on record with the county.

    1. Body armor is not magical: I just bought my first SAPI ~Level III hard plate (not so much because I want defense against rifle rounds as I don’t want to get momentarily incapacitated by a center of mass e.g. sternum hit that doesn’t penetrate but packs a wallop) and despite being “Large” it really doesn’t cover that much area. It’s more designed to save lives by protecting the most vital parts of the torso than to prevent incapacitation if a lot of stuff is flying around.

      That said, they’ll be wearing much greater coverage Level III-A soft body armor, which will stop everything that’s not a rifle round (although they might not be good for much for a while if it stops a 12 gauge slug).

      It says a lot that in many ways this is the ultimate nightmare for the armed citizen: your odds of surviving such an encounter and the legal aftermath aren’t good and you will be ruined in the process. On the other hand, if they know you’re armed they generally won’t try this gambit, but of course it’s the wrong address mistake where things can most easily go to hell.

  5. Sounds to me like someone on the SWAT team is a big fan of Tex Cobb’s entry method in “Uncommon Valor”.

  6. IIRC, IMI (Israeli Military Industries) makes an entry door that resembles a vault entry. They’re thicker – about 3 inches – and use an engineered steel frame as the core, with multiple locking lugs all the way around the perimeter, and nicely dressed with an attractive wood veneer over a layer of Kevlar. A tad spendy, but you get what you pay for.

    Don’t forget whatever door you use is no better than the framing to which it’s attached.

    FWIW, chain saws can be negated with 1 inch wide 1/8″ thick mild steel flat stock screwed to the door surface under a plywood veneer. Same stuff will slow down, but not completely atop, a circular saw with a diamond blade. Then again, so will a quantity of outbound 168 grain .308″ projectiles.

  7. Keep in mind that no-knock warrants are almost never justified. If the concern is drugs being flushed down the toilet, then the quantity involved is pretty small, and why are risking getting someone killed over what is a pretty minor crime? If the quantity involved is large, it’s hard to imagine that the dealer is going to flush several hundred pounds of cocaine down the toilet.

    There are legitimate no-knock warrant situations: hostages; national security/terrorist matters; but these are vanishingly rare. Judges need to be far less willing to issue no-knock warrants.

  8. @Jughead – sorry, it’s been too long. I saw them quite some time ago installed in a certain building in a certain major American city. They were of Israeli manufacture, and there was enough IMI stuff around that I remember thinking at the time that IMI had to be involved. In the intervening years it’s entirely possible that IMI has spun off that product line to focus on their military lines.

    I just did a quick Google search, and while the first couple of pages were Chinese companies, a few pages in American outfits started showing up, so they’re out there and available (I’d be skeptical of metallurgy and/or engineering from China). As you might expect, those kind of companies aren’t very chatty, and probably the best way to locate them is through what might be termed “specialized channels” within the security industry. Your local “Fred and Larry’s Excellent Burglar Alarm Company” won’t know who to contact, but high end business security outfits will. BTW, the prices on most of this stuff are stunning.

    I had association a while back with a user of such sorts of stuff, and one thing that frequently gets overlooked is the subtle external site modifications that direct people away from the door in the first place. There’s no one thing that’s “the” solution, it’s always a broad range of what appear to be insignificant things that work as a whole, and the more insignificant they appear the better.

Comments are closed.