Hi Samuel
Samuel wrote:
I thought that most, if not all, home invasions were carried out by armed criminals. Certainly in the one cited they were armed.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. By “armed” I meant “armed with firearms”. You post two accounts of home invasions; neither involved firearms, although the second account does refer at the very end to a third invasion which did.
My point is that, if we fuel these home invasions by issuing one or both factions with firearms, the likely outcome is worse, not better. Given the factors that I think drive home invasions, I don’t think promoting an arms race would have a good outcome.
Samuel wrote:
I wouldn't think that that house was typical. The area that I grew up in, Auburn (NSW), was a working class suburb where it was rare to find a locked door; and in the country town of Uralla where doors were also unlocked, in fact my Uncle Pat's house didn't have any provision for locking the back door, there was a lock on the front door but it was never used. It was a 'store bought' door so it probably came with a lock.
I do remember my Aunty Mary's revolver on the kitchen mantlepiece.
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I might add that the bars on your windows were malleable iron not cast iron, the which would not stop anyone who had a hammer (just being pedantic
) and most 19C doors in Australia are either cedar (for the better off) or Californian redwood (less costly but looks like cedar) or plain old oregon pine from the US of A and later jarrah from West Oz.
Oak is rare and costly being imported from England. Maybe the house was fortified to keep out the Peelers?
Every house on the street was the same. They were all built between about 1840 and 1870. The oak would have been Irish oak, or possibly American oak, which was just coming in at the time. This was on the outskirts of Dublin, and only a couple of hundred metres from a police barracks. The fear at that time and in that place would not have been of political violence. And, as for locked doors, I suspect the doors were mostly unlocked during the day, but they were mostly locked at night. (That was certainly the way when I was growing up.)
As well as the bars (not cast iron, as you rightly point out), all the windows had wooden shutters, secured by iron bars. The shutters themselves served to keep the room warmer at night, but the heavy iron bars had a different function.
Your point about the country town is interesting. Home invasion today is in fact almost entirely an urban phenomenon, and I suspect it always was. In fact, it was only as the spread of the city reached the place where I grew up that the police barracks was built and the houses began to be fortified. If you want to avoid a home invasion, apart from not involving yourself with organised crime, not keeping drugs on the premises and not incurring unsatisfied drug debts, the best thing you can do is go and live back of Bourke.
