I have turned in a kinda high tech direction as of late. I have a friend who lived outside of Sacramento that had a terrible event happen in early January. His garage was not connected to his house and the power and phone lines ran from roof to roof. I will not say that this guy is of high moral character as he drinks far too much, and far too often. He had closed the bars at 2 AM and managed to get his truck on the garage and close the door. He found his bed and managed to take his boots off before falling into it. But, he was still inebriated, awakened to the sound of loud engines and someone pounding on his front door. He picked up the phone, but the land line was down. He tried turning on a light, but the power was out. He picked up a 1911 and a Maglight, but stopped short of the front door. It's the "let the intruder come to you" concept. Someone was attacking the door from outside with an axe. He took a defensive position, and was ready to shoot when the man with the axe finally chopped down the door. Luckily, he lit the intruder with the beam of the Maglight before using his pistol. The man in the door was a fire fighter. He was forcing entry to extract and protect any civilians inside the house. A fire had broken out in his garage, and it had taken out the power and phone lines. The garage and his truck were a complete loss, but he was insured. The really great thing is that he had the Maglight, used it first, instead of shooting the man with the ax. Since then I have spent quite a bit of money and embraced new (to me) technology. I have two Remington 870 combat shotguns that now wear weaponlights. My new SIG Sauer P220R .45 ACP also wears one, as does my 7.62x39mm Ruger Mini 30. I want to make sure that if I find myself in hostilities that I know who I am up against, and not find myself suffering for shooting a COP, Fireman or EMT, especially if I am awakened in the night and am not firing on all cylinders. I think this is a high value pursuit, and if I was still a peace officer, I'd like knowing that a civilian had put the time and money, and the training time, to prevent potential disasters from happening.
There is another side to this: if I do find myself facing serious bad guys, blinding them briefly with a 340 to 500 lumen LED light gives me a tactical advantage that just might save my life. And I know, when I switch on that monster light I will be letting every bad guy on the periphery as to where I am and that I am tech savvy. I'm willing to take that risk as the combination of identifying emergency personnel, as well as seriously affecting the vision of my real opponents is worth the risk. In training, I was required to face a person with a 500 lumen light on a shotgun, and it turned my vision into a big purple blur that didn't totally wear off for hours. I could have tried shooting at the instructor with the light, but I couldn't see the sights on my 1911; I would have had to try point shooting at someone using something that was actually painful to look at. And, lest we forget, it's dark roughly half the time, and, from my personal experience, most of the severe felonies I saw committed took place between sunset and sunrise.
So, that was a new realization for me, and it will affect my defensive tactical doctrine from here until I check out St. Peter's Precinct.
BTW, I have both SureFire and Streamlight products, and find the Streamlight products are powerful, reliable and easier to adapt to my particular weapons. You can't go wrong with either. I will suggest forgetting budget products from knock-off nations. The SureFire and Streamlight products are tough and reliable. These are not tinkered up gismos that will fail the first time out.