10:42 – Barbara picked up a Saturnalia tree on her way home from work yesterday. She’s decorating the tree right now with lights, ornaments, and the traditional stuffed panda sitting on top. Barbara’s heading over to her sister’s house for Thanksgiving. For me, this is just another work day. Barbara will bring me food later.
Work on the prepping book continues. Right now, I’m writing about hardening your home by such means as installing longer screws in door hinges, planting thorny bushes around the perimeter, and so on. One major problem for many homes is that their walls provide little to no resistance to bullets. I actually did some informal testing on this back in the 70’s, and found that even a .22 rimfire bullet penetrated most common residential wall types. The exceptions were concrete block and brick veneer, both of which stood up pretty well to anything up to and including .308/30-06 AP rounds. The block or brick was damaged, and couldn’t stand up to more than a couple heavy-caliber hits in the same place, but it provided a reasonable barrier.
Not really expecting to find any authoritative information on the subject, I just went out and did a Google search. I was surprised to find a technical report on just this topic from the Canadian Police Research Centre. They actually built examples of different types of residential walls and fired bullets from various pistols and rifles at them. In the conclusion I found this sentence, which sums things up nicely: “Walls finished with either a clay brick or concrete brick veneer prevented all but the .50 Browning from complete penetration of the wall assembly.” And that “all” included the 7mm Remington Magnum and the .375H&H.