Let me answer your two immediate questions right now. Yes, you read that right, and Yes I’m serious. This is a thought experiment (declaimer: obey the law) that addresses our current home defense scenario shortcomings. The term landmine used in this article will refer to the anti-personnel variety, rather than anti-vehicle models. Insurance carriers and home alarm networks serve as great data-collectors, so expect lots of references to them throughout this article, despite their inherent biases (i.e to sell systems and policies). As always, make sure to sharpen your pitchforks as I make the case for legalizing landmines for home defense.
Imagine that you find yourself in the most commonly advertised home defense scenario; it’s late at night and you were enjoying some Ambien-induced shuteye. Suddenly, a loud noise shatters the tranquility of your home; a burglar has entered your sanctuary. The adrenaline spikes in your system as you reach for your impractically long barreled rifle or needlessly loud shotgun. You fumble around trying to load your beloved range-toy in the dark. After all, humans don’t rise to the occasion, we sink to the level of our training. That means if you’re like most Americans, you’re overweight, have poor reaction time, and you don’t practice very often, and your practice is only against stationary paper. You’ve finally loaded your gun, cocked it and are ready to go full Rambo. You fire all of your rounds in the general direction of the filthy criminal. You miss most of your shots since even the over-militarized police force can only manage to hit their targets about 1/3rd of the time (says a former Special Forces operator discussed in his book).
Now let’s leave the most commonly advertised home defense scenario and come back to reality. Most home break-ins happen during the day when Mom and Dad are at work and the kids are at school. Therefore, your Rambo arsenal isn’t going to do a goddamn thing to stop the two-legged vermin; nobody will be pulling a trigger. While I fully support gun ownership and loosening the grip of government, we need to be practical; if the point of a home-defense weapon is to protect against break-ins, there exists a better tool for the job.
Nearly four out of five burglaries involve using either the front door, the back door or a low-hanging window as the scumbag’s point of entry. Given these predictable entry points, and the unreliability of human aim under duress, automation is the solution. Landmines would be a fantastic choice for home defense. They will go off the second they are triggered, thus taking human hesitancy out of the equation entirely. Land mines are the ultimate in set-it-and-forget-it technology, thus solving the absent homeowner problem; no homeowner intervention required. Home defense landmines also solve the accuracy problem as well; no more rattling a heavy long-barrel around with poor breathing control.
Sorry, your neighborhood watch committee sign isn’t keeping you safe, and neither is Fido. However, land mines would serve as an amazing deterrent. Currently, 3 out of 5 lowlifes would consider another target if a security system was present. Landmines totally smother the Korean Demilitarized Zone and hence, human foot travel in the border region is so incredibly rare that it’s an unofficial nature preserve. Need another example? Landmines also heavily dot the land border between the United States and Cuba, and nobody goes for a casual stroll along that specific beach. India and Pakistan are also quite fond of their use, they are also common along the Turkish-Syrian border. Something tells me casual strolls in these areas aren’t very common either. Given that most burglars aren’t expert thieves by any stretch, the waste-of-biomass will pick another house to victimize rather than risk losing a leg.
Landmine use is actually more humane than using guns anyways. They are designed to amputate rather than kill, since in wartime an amputated enemy is more of a drain on the enemy’s medical network and supply lines than a dead enemy. Sadly, only 13% of these shit-stains are brought to justice in our current landscape. However, losing a leg at the scene of the crime would be a treasure trove of DNA evidence, which can lead to easily convicting the perp. A simple cross-reference of the disconnected leg at the crime scene against bloody, one-legged emergency room patients would be a dead giveaway. The future-inmate losing a leg or their eyesight would have another societal benefit; lower recidivism. As we all know, the United States has a recidivism problem, however you’d be hard-pressed to find a blind burglar hopping down the street on one leg while carrying their loot. In this vein, landmines make society safer; one cannot commit crimes if they lack the physical capacity to do so.
The landmines used for home-defense can of course have modern technologies layered on top, such as WiFi connectivity. The law-abiding homeowner can use their smartphone to remotely activate or deactivate the mines. Better yet, the mines can be set to an automatic timer; turn them off when everyone is home and then turn them on when everyone goes to bed or when the home is vacant. The technology to do this already exists and is currently used with other home defense systems, so there is no reason it can’t be applied here. Detonations could also be automatically uploaded to the blockchain, which could be used as further evidence to put the ne’er-do-well behind bars.
“But Dan, what about the legal ramifications?” What legal ramifications? Generally speaking, most US states have some version of the Castle Doctrine, so criminal prosecution of the homeowner is already unlikely anyways. As for civil cases, various experts agree that the most common civil lawsuits come from an uninvolved third person who was wounded. Landmines avoid this problem entirely. Besides, the odds of losing a home defense civil lawsuit are so low that it’s basically not even worth discussing. Homeowner’s insurance already doesn’t cover shooting an invader anyways, so the eventual counter-argument of Insurance wont cover landmine damage is a moot point. The lack of insurance coverage hasn’t deterred private gun ownership in the United States, and there is no reason to believe it would impact private landmine ownership. Many of the linked sources have introduced another point; most burglars are economically desperate; hence they’re unlikely to have the funds to pay a lawyer to sue the homeowner anyways, so this entire legal defense scenario isn’t a very likely one to begin with.
The United States has a long and well-documented history of adopting military inventions for civilian use, therefore landmines for home defense would follow precedent. As stated in many of the above links, the United States has not signed the Mine Ban Treaty of 1997, so this isn’t even a far-off solution to implement either. The only true obstacle would be repealing the exclusionary and archaic domestic laws that forbid their use. The government has no moral right to monopolize landmines, and they don’t respect the intelligence of citizens either. Once these laws are struck down, an entire new market can emerge.
Let’s legalize landmines, then watch the bad guys tread carefully…
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