While it’s hardly healthy to live your life in constant fear, it would also be pretty careless to act as though a life-threatening situation could never happen to you.
That’s why our schools did fire drills and it’s also why it never hurts to keep some helpful information in the back of your mind for those situations that might need it.
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Fortunately, there are a lot of people out there willing to give us that information and they tend to have a pretty good imagination for what could happen in our day-to-day lives.
But of course, you’ll often notice that many of these tips address situations that unfold either by accident or as a result of getting a little too close to nature.
Today, however, we’re going to be talking about a situation in which other people put us in danger and how we can safely keep them away from us.
As part of a series of TikToks explaining what to do in embarrassing or dangerous situations, screenwriter Ben J. Handy outlined how to respond when an intruder breaks into your home.
But as he explained in this video , our preparations should start long before any of this happens.
By that, he meant, “You and everyone you live with have to have a meeting.”
Much like in the event of a fire, this meeting should see the members of a household work out escape routes and plans for where to meet up after everyone gets away.
And while the movies love to show us scenes of people heroically taking down intruders, this isn’t something we should do in real life.
As Handy said, “If you confront this person, your odds of dying increase enormously.”
Indeed, he recommended not communicating with the intruder in any way or revealing yourself to them. Instead, we call 911 and stay on the line with the operator regardless of what happens on their end.
And once emergency help has been summoned, what happens after that depends a lot on the situation.
Although we should focus on getting away from the compromised house, hiding is the second-best option to that.
And while he goes into more detail for each step in the video available here, Handy said that if neither getting out nor hiding is an option, we still want to put as much between ourselves and the intruder as possible.
As he put it, “Can’t hide? Lock doors, barricade doors, do whatever you can to stay away from them.”
