How to fortify your castle (your home): Part 1

Ok. The hordes are approaching and you need to keep them out. What do you do?

We have all seen the movies. The Zombies are closing in and the frantic occupants of the house are trying to push furniture up against the doors and nail a few boards over the windows. Makes for exciting viewing but in reality that's not a situation you want to be in.

Now some furniture by the door might actually be a good idea at first. It's probably the fastest thing you can do, so go ahead and shove your piano in front of the door but you really need to have a fortification plan.

I don't know what kind of place you live in so I can't tell you exactly what will work best for your situation. Living on the 10th floor of an apartment building is different than an old farm house in the country.

So what I am going to do over a number of blog posts is share with you some of my fortification and defense plan. You can take what you want from it and change it to meet your needs.

Step one - get your guns!

Arm myself and my family members. I have set up my firearms storage in such a way that I am never more than 60 seconds from a firearm. Most of the time I can have access to a firearm in less than 20 seconds but as I am a big believer in safe storage of firearms some times it's just not practical for me to have guns all over the place.

Some people have said that if a person can get to a firearm in just a few seconds it can't possibly be stored safely. Well that's just not true. In today's safety conscious environment manufactures have come up with a wide variety of gun safety gear that's both effective and quick. On each of my firearms I have a three digit combination trigger lock and as I am careful to turn the tumblers to the same position each time I lock the gun it takes me 6 to 10 seconds to unlock the gun.

As well my gun cabinet has a 4 digit digital lock that takes me exactly 4 seconds to unlock. I suggest you do a few drills to see how long it takes you to get to your guns. This will help you work out any bugs and ensure you can get to your firearms as fast as possible. Remember to make sure that you use a digital lock for your guns that has a backup key.

If you have a digital only lock it could get fried by an EMP or the batteries could just be drained. It would really suck to have done all this work and then end up dead because your batteries were out of juice.  Now for you non-firearms owners you still need to think about weapon storage. And safety. Because by "weapons" I mean a sword, a bayonet, a baseball bat, pepper spray, stun gun and so on.

You may not need to lock up your weapons but they need to be readily accessible in an emergency. It will not do you any good to have a baseball bat if you can't find it when you need it.

Stay tuned to Zombie Apocalypse Survivor blog for Part 2 coming soon!