Home invasion in Argentina: 3 Very important lessons learned

Home invasions usually go down in a somewhat similar manner. Bad guys break in, if there’s occupants inside they may or many not get hurt/killed, sometimes they fight back and kill/injure the bad guys and that’s pretty much it.

Its not always that simple though and this recent incident that took place in Argentina is an interesting case study.

79 year old Carlos lives with his disabled wife and grandson in City Bell, Argentina. They are good people and help neighbours in need. One such person is 23 year old Nahuel Alejandro Ferraro, who sells cleaning supplies door to door to make a living. For months Carlos helps Nahuel with money, feeds him when he’s down on his luck, buys some supplies for him to sell. They become friends and Nahuel eventually introduces them to his new girlfriend. One day said girlfriend drops by to visit Carlos, asks if she can use the bathroom and as she walks into the house a man wearing a motorcycle helmet pushes both of them in at knife point demanding money. The old man walks towards his room and gives the burglar what little money he had. That’s not enough and the burglar demands more. When the burglar is distracted Carlos grabs a Doberman revolver, 32 caliber. As he turns he sees the attacker closing in with his knife. He shoots once, hitting the man in the chest, stopping the attack. The man later dies in the hospital.

You can imagine the old man’s surprise when after removing the helmet they ID the robber as Nahuel Alejandro Ferraro, the young man he had been helping all along.
Carlos would later say “I am very sorry, I had no choice but to shoot. I treated him like my own grandson, fed him, gave him money”.

Carlos’s actual grandson would later say during an interview, crying with frustration “You know, we treated him like family. The sad thing is that my grandfather would have given him the money anyway if he had just asked”.
This is one of those sad, ironic stories, but there’s a few good lessons here:

1)You cannot trust strangers… or people in general.
This guy was a friend of the family. They were already helping him out. There was no reason for him to use violence. They knew that he had a troubled criminal past and helped him out in spite of it with food, money and friendship without judging him, trying to keep him on the good side of the law. None of that mattered and he still went after them with a knife.  Was this criminal an idiot? Sure, many criminals are, but he was also evil.
But the point is that while most criminals attack people they don’t know, others are borderline psychotic and will befriend their victims, spending months or years planning and lying, pretending to be friends and earning their trust. This is particularly common in fraud and identity theft, or marriage followed by murder just to keep the inheritance.
You just have to careful with who you trust.

2) 32 long is the best caliber for stopping knife attacks…
I’m joking!  But it did get the job done. My point here is sometimes we obsess over the ideal round and stopping power yet its not the first time I hear of a single 32 long round to the chest stopping someone cold. Shot placement and sure, a bit of luck, goes a long way. If I get to choose I’d go for a 357 magnum. If that’s too much for the person to handle then some good 38 special defensive loads. But a 32 sure is better than no gun at all. So is 22LR.

3)The use of the revolver. The Doberman 32 revolver used in this case saved this man’s life.
It had been inherited and 79 year old Carlos was definitely not a gun person. But remember the post I did just a few days ago, about when is a revolver better than a pistol? This is the perfect example. Little or no training, forgotten for decades, yet a good revolver (in some cases even a bad one) can save the day and go “boom!” when you pick it up and pull the trigger. An auto in the hands of someone with little or no experience is more likely to cause trouble. Empty chamber, safeties, things that just can go wrong at the worst possible moment if someone isn’t well trained in the use of such firearm. Do I recommend getting a revolver over a Glock? Well yes, if you are not going to get professional training and practice with certain frequency then I do. For those serious about self-defense autos are clearly the better choice.
What’s the Doberman revolver like? It’s junk.

I had a Doberman 22LR revolver myself that belonged to my father. What a POS. The trigger, hammer and frame were pot metal and eventually broke after a couple hundred rounds fired. I literally ended up breaking that gun to pieces with my bare hands, so soft and brittle was that excuse of a gun. Broke it and left it to rust away in a flowerpot, only useful as iron for the plants. I think the barrel and cylinder where the only parts made of actual steel.
FerFAL
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”