James Rawles - Founders

Durward Perkins was feeding grain to the cows, just twenty yards from the silo. Terry yelled down to him, “D.! Do you recognize those vans?”

Perkins answered, “Nope.”

She shouted, “Get back in the house, and wake up Ken and then Karen, right now !” Grabbing the hammer, Terry began pounding on the pipe bell. Durward dropped his grain bucket and sprinted toward the house.

Terry edged forward off the stool and sat on the plywood, raising her M4gery, resting her forearms on her knees for a good shooting position.

A man stepped out of the passenger side of the lead van with a pair of bolt cutters. Just after he cut off the gate’s padlock, Terry thumbed off the carbine’s safety and fired. From the dirt that was kicked up behind him, she could see that her shot went just over the man’s shoulder.

Then she remembered Tom Kennedy’s advice from years before: “Whenever you are shooting uphill or downhill, hold low .” The man dodged to the side just as she pulled the trigger again, so she missed for the second time.

Several doors on both vans opened, and suddenly there were several AKs and ARs pointed at the house and up at the silo. The intruders opened fire, and soon there were bullets puncturing or ricocheting off the silo. Feeling unexpected calm, Terry realigned her sights on the same man’s chest—holding lower—and squeezed the trigger twice more. This time he went down, kicking and screaming.

The firefight soon escalated as Ken began returning fire with his Vector HK91 clone, firing rapidly. Shoeless and wearing just a pair of British DPM camouflage pants and a brown T-shirt, Ken leaned his elbows across the kitchen table. He was shooting through the closed kitchen window. He and Terry soon established a rapid firing tempo at the two vans.

Ken’s vantage point was slightly to the left of the vans and level, and Terry’s was slightly to the right and above. The vans were in a deadly cross fire. Two of the men from the rear van hesitated and held their ground, but all of the others leapt back into the vans. Realizing that her magazine was nearly empty, Terry did a rapid magazine switch. As she did, Ken’s heavy fire continued to rake the vans, shattering window after window. The two men still standing outside the vans realized that they were outgunned and jumped in to join the others.

The vans quickly backed away from the gate, just as Ken was changing magazines. Terry continued to fire. She could now see blood splatters inside the windows of both vans.

As they roared away, Ken resumed firing, but he had the chance to fire just four more rounds before he judged that the vans were out of range. The looter on the ground ceased thrashing. Ken put a fresh magazine in his HK, and shouted, “Is everybody okay?”

Durward answered, “We’re okay, just shook up.” His daughters were wailing back in their bedroom.

Ken’s ears were ringing. He hated shooting indoors without any hearing protection, but the attack had come so suddenly that he had had no choice.

With his rifle shouldered, Ken edged out through the front door, and then through the porch door. He shouted up to Terry in the OP, “What’s your status?”

She answered, “Green and green!”—indicating that she was uninjured and had plenty of ammunition. A moment later, she shouted, “They left one guy on the ground. I think he’s dead.”

“Any stay-behinds?”

Terry responded, “I don’t think so, but things were happening pretty fast.”

“You did great! Okay, let’s hang tight for a while to make sure that guy is dead, and we’ll wait and see whether they decide to come back.”

Ken asked Karen Perkins to stand guard and watch for anyone approaching the back of the house, from the vantage point of the master bedroom window. Then he retrieved his boots and coat from his bedroom and put them on.

As they waited, and watched, Durward leaned over Ken’s shoulder and alternated between looking through his rifle’s scope and through a battered pair of old binoculars finished with black crinkle paint. “Crimminy sakes, that’s a lot of blood. He ain’t moving. You expect he’s dead?” He handed the binoculars to Ken.

After spending a minute looking through the binoculars, Ken said, “Yes, I think so. But I’m no expert. We should make sure of it. Have you got some earplugs?”

“Yeah, I’ll go get them.”

He returned a minute later, offering a handful of disposable foam earplugs in clear cellophane packages.

Ken opened a package and inserted a pair. As he did, he gestured for Perkins to do likewise. Then he said, “You’ve got the rifle with the scope.”

“To make ‘absa-tively’ sure he’s dead?”

Ken nodded. “That’s right, D. Just give me a chance to warn the ladies that you’re going to shoot.”

It took Perkins a full minute to get ready for the shot. He laid a throw cushion from the couch on the windowsill of the window that Ken had been using to shoot from. He pulled up a dining room chair to sit on, and rested the fore-end of the Remington pump-action .270 across the cushion. He exhaled loudly. Then he cranked up the scope to 9 power and clicked off the rifle’s safety. Just when Ken thought that he was about to shoot, Durward said, “Give me a sec. I’m still kind of nervous. The crosshair is dancing.”

He again loudly let out a breath. A few moments later, he squeezed off a shot. Pulling the muzzle back down from the recoil, he looked through the scope and said, “I hit him just above his ear. So if he was faking before, he ain’t faking now.” He calmly pumped the rifle’s action, chambering a fresh cartridge, and toggled the safety button to the safe position. Then he removed the rifle’s magazine and topped it off with a cartridge from his pocket.

They waited another hour to see if the looters would return, Durward concerned that they might be back with reinforcements. He paced back and forth between the kitchen and the back bedrooms, consoling his wife and daughters, and giving them updates.

As they waited, Ken said, “I’m sorry that I shot right through your kitchen window.”

“Shucks, that’s what they make clear sheet plastic for, right? Don’t you worry…. I’m sure I’ll be able to scrounge up some replacement windows in the next few days. But before dark tonight, we’ll cover the broken windows with sheet plastic. We can hold it in place with some batten strips.”

Their neighbor from down the road drove up to the gate on his ATV, with his mixed breed cattle dog on the back as usual. A sporterized Springfield rifle rested in the rubberized spring steel forks mounted on the ATV’s front deck. Carrying their rifles, Ken and Durward walked out to the gate to talk to him.

As they neared the gate, the neighbor asked, “You folks okay?”

Durward answered, “Yeah, we’re fine, just scared spitless.”

“All that shooting, and you only got one of them?”

“I think we hit a few more of them inside their rigs,” Ken answered.

Durward swung the gate open and the three men closely examined the body and the surrounding ground. The gravel and the adjoining pavement were heavily littered with chunks of broken safety glass, in at least three distinct colors. There was blood on some of it. There was even more blood around the body. They found more than seventy pieces of fired brass that obviously came from AR-15s, AK-47s, and at least one AK-74. The lacquer-coated steel-cased brass from the latter captivated Durward and his neighbor. This was the first time that either of them had even heard of the smaller-caliber AK. The neighbor’s dog watched all this from the back of the ATV, with its tail wagging.

The dead looter’s body was partially resting on an inexpensive pair of Chinese-made bolt cutters. The man was in his late twenties or early thirties, Hispanic, and overweight. He had lots of tattoos. He had been hit twice through the lungs by .223 bullets from Terry’s M4, and once through the head by Durward’s .270 Winchester.