What a Booby

Tam is going on about booby traps, and she is right.  Not a good idea.  Not even after the Zombacalypse.

Dude named Cyr (what a great name.  Cyr.  such a waste.) set up a pistol to shoot when a door was opened.  Ick.  Sick bastard.  Well, maybe familiarity bred some contempt on what might be a nigh branchless family tree, but Cyr got hoisted by his own petard.  In the closest thing you will see to a petard these days.

And this got me thinking...  what would make a good booby trap?

Now don't you finish this blog post and head on down to Home Depot for supplies.  Even the best one is an awful idea.

Trap-door, that YOU trigger, so when someone breaks into the front door, so bad guy rolls down to the basement Bond-villain style?  Maybe.  Maybe bad guy breaks his neck in the fall, too.  You HAVE improved on Cyr in that you triggered the trap.   It wasn't automated by motion detector or what not.  If a bad guy needs dispatching and you can trigger the trap or blast him with a 12 gauge you are wielding, which is better?  If he tumbles to the basement and doesn't succumb to incapacitation you still have a bad guy to deal with.

But there is the whole accidental deployment, where visiting Grandma goes a tumbling down the hole.  Much more likely than your housegun getting her.

Ok, how bout this.  Less injurious.   Have a mudroom.  Outer door is normal, inner door is reinforced to slow down the 4 home invaders smashing in.  You trip the switch and pepper spray from twelve cans in the wall start spraying the invaders.  Criminals don't where breath apparatus.  A small room full of capsicum is quite a deterrent.

The cons to those pros is the accidental deployment that catches Grandma, again.  And if grandma smokes, that room full of flammable aerosol could cause some trouble for the whole neighborhood.  PHOOM!

So, yeah, don't do it.  Keep booby traps a mental exercise.  Easier to do firearm training than to deploy elaborate gadgets with hard to gauge reliability or effectiveness or high chance of tragic mishap.  I am not the A-Team or MacGuyver, after all.