Is your garage piled with junk, yours and the spouse’s? Stacks of rusting, greasy tools and ropes or odd plumbing and electrical fixtures that you can’t throw away because one day, somehow, somewhere, they might come in handy? Or boxes of decorations for every conceivable holiday, the wire-and-rope-light Santa Claus and reindeer for Christmas or the giant, blow-up rabbit that you attach to your leaf-blower for Easter?

A garage is nominally part of your house (more so than a “car port” like the one my family had when I was growing up in Florida) and thus there is a sense of safety — of coziness — about it, even if it is a cluttered mess. In a way, the garage is part of the sanctuary, the sanctity of home. Maybe your washer and dryer are there or the water heater or perhaps the kids play there, running between the aisles of what comedian George Carlin called “your stuff.”

A casual inspection of news from around the country last week, however, has suggested to me that my garage and the driveway leading to it — I’ve crawled under the truck there to change the oil and kids routinely draw on the cement with colored chalk — might in fact be a very dangerous place.

  • Pennsylvania’s WJAC, an NBC news affiliate, reports that Emma Troutman of Centre County was attacked in her gravel driveway. At 11:30 p.m., a man jumped out of the dark, slammed her head against her car’s window and demanded money. Troutman, a mother of two small children and a trained law enforcement officer, opened the car door and reached inside. Instead of handing her assailant cash, however, she pulled out her gun. The unknown attacker ran when she pointed it at him and, at that point, she had the presence of mind not shoot. Troutman believes the man was looking for an easy target.
  • According to the East Idaho News, a Rigby man drove home in the morning and discovered that his garage door was wide open. The burglar, one Bill Shinkle from Victor, an hour to the east, had kicked down a door and was rummaging around inside the house; the homeowner’s 17-year-old son was asleep inside. The son, a hunter, grabbed his shotgun and father and son located the burglar in a bedroom. Seeing them, Shinkle opened fire with a handgun and the young man returned fire, hitting Shinkle in “the lower abdomen.” The would-be thief ran out of the house clutching his groin and collapsed in the front yard where the Jefferson County sheriff found him. The Rigby homeowner “couldn’t be prouder” of his son. The homeowner’s name was withheld for privacy. Shinkle was arrested and treated for his injuries.
  • Fox 4 News out of Kansas City reports that a 73-year-old man in the Bevo Mill neighborhood, about five miles south of the St. Louis arch, was working inside his detached garage in the afternoon when two men — Jonathan Warren, 18, of Florissant and Lonnie Middlebrook, 20, of Ferguson — came through the open door and put a gun to his head. As they looked around, the homeowner, a victim of robbery attempts in the past, grabbed his nearby handgun and shot both would-be robbers. The police reportedly found both men dead with their guns; the gun recovered from Warren had been reported stolen just days before the incident in Bevo Mills. The homeowner (name withheld to protect his privacy) was taken to be fingerprinted as part of the investigation.

I could cite additional instances and there is always the Clint Eastwood film Grand Torino (2008) in which the homeowner’s garage and vintage automobile are practically living, breathing characters.

So next time you reach for the remote and throw open the garage door and let the kids run among your piles of stuff, please remember that unless you have invested in a fence or passive security measures, a garage provides little security and is often open to the world. Be vigilant. Be safe.