The Home Defense Gun For When You’re Away From Home

Home defense guns serve a specific purpose; to bring more firepower to bear on unwanted intruders than your daily carry gun can provide. The goal of a home defense gun is to end the fight as quickly as possible while minimizing any potential harm to loved ones or innocent bystanders. Whether it’s a full-sized pistol, a carbine or a shotgun, a home defense gun improves the odds if someone decides to invade your domicile.

The need to defend your home persists, whether we’re at home or not. My good friend Michael Bane tells the story of renowned firearms trainer Walt Rouch, who was forced to drive all the way across the country with nothing but a pair of J-frame revolvers with him because the country had shut down right after 9/11.

Sometimes in my time on the road, my hotels weren’t in the greatest locations. I’m also frequently gone for days at a time, and while the chances of something bad happening while I’m away from home are low, they’re not zero.

Also, I want something that doesn’t scream, “I have a gun!” when I’m check into my hotel. Carrying an obvious rifle case into a hotel is a great way to attract unwanted attention from some of the worst elements of society.

The travel solutions I came up with are better-suited to trips via car, as they don’t require any specially secured case to go on an airplane, but they can easily be adapted to that role if needed.

The first is a Recover Tactical 20/20N Stabilizer for compact and full-size GLOCK pistols. This setup is particularly well-suited to carrying with you in your vehicle because you aren’t leaving an unattended gun in your car. It’s a clamshell brace which folds around a G19 or G17-sized pistol, making for faster follow-up shots and increased accuracy. Best of all, because it’s a brace and not a gun, if a crook snakes it out of your vehicle or hotel room, they’ve stolen a brace, not a gun.

Another idea is a “firearm” such as the Mossberg Shockwave. While it may look like a short-barreled shotgun, which requires additional permit slips to own, but it’s considered to be a “firearm” under the National Firearms Act.

No, I don’t understand that either.

The Shockwave probably isn’t a fifty-yard firearm, but it more than makes up for it in close-range, home defense type firepower.

A third choice is a folding pistol caliber carbine like the KelTec SUB2000, Smith & Wesson M&P FPC…or the Zev/Magpul FDP. These fold for traveling and can easily be stowed inside a normal travel bag, yet can be deployed in an instant and offer you greater range and greater accuracy than what your daily carry pistol provides.

As a bonus, all three of these guns use magazines from commonly-available defensive pistols (double-stack 9mm GLOCK pistols in the case of the SUB2000 and FDP, 9mm S&W M&P double-stack magazines for the FPC), so your carry gear can remain consistent across multiple platforms.

Threats today can present themselves wherever we find ourselves. We have a plan to defend our homes with a dedicated home-defense gun, so it makes sense to have a plan — and the gear needed — to defend our living quarters when we’re away from home, too. And the peace of mind that comes from having something that gives you more of an edge than just your everyday carry pistol will let you sleep better wherever you are.