A man has been left shaken after a gun was fired into his family home, only to be stopped by an Ikea bookcase.

Daniel, 41, has lived in the same house in Santa Ana, California, for seven years, but a recent shooting in his home has forced him to consider a move for himself and his young family.

“When it happened, I wasn’t in shock; I was more in emergency mode and just wanted to protect my family,” he said. Newsweek.

“But after the police came and everything was sorted out, my mind started going to a dark place where I imagined if I had been hit and my wife found me in the morning – or worse, the wife or my daughter would have been hit.”

Newsweek has reached out to the Santa Ana Police Department for comment.

Daniel, the owner of the start-up Saturday Morning Cards, took it to his own TikTok page of @the.great.curator in October to show a bullet hole through a window and mirror, a crack in a cupboard and damage to a bookcase.

But the library stopped the bullet from passing through the adjacent wall, where his family slept.

He said in clipwhich also shows broken glass on the floor: “Last night a stray bullet went through my upstairs window, missing my head by several feet.”

He added: “Thank God and my Ikea bookcase that no one was hurt last night.”

Daniel said Newsweek he was in his office late at night when “I heard a loud noise followed by glass breaking”. At first he thought, “Maybe someone threw a rock at my window,” but when he investigated, he saw that the bullet hole went right through his mirror.

“I knew immediately that someone had shot into my house.”

Dropping to the ground for cover, he crawled through the broken window to the room where his wife and 4-year-old daughter were sleeping, terrified that the bullet could have gone “through the wall and hurt them.”

Finding them safe, he took them to the ground with him because “at that point, I didn’t know if someone was trying to kill me or if it was a drive-by or if someone was breaking into my house.”

Daniel grabbed his own gun, turned off the lights and called 911. When the Santa Ana Police Department arrived nearly 20 minutes later, they told him he was lucky he wasn’t hurt and the bullet was tied to a stray bullet from a “separate incident two blocks away.”

“It’s very scary to think what could have happened,” Daniel said Newsweek.

“I did the social media post to help me deal with the traumatic event because if I couldn’t talk about it I think I would feel a lot of anxiety about it.”

Daniel’s video got a huge reaction online, being viewed over 800,000 times. One user wrote: “Time to move.”

“The three most important things in real estate are location, location, location,” said one TikTok user, while another praised “IKEA Bulletproof Furniture.”

One user shared her own terrifying story, writing: “I had a bum come through the wall and into the mattress I was laying on.”

California has a relatively low number of gun deaths per capita in the United States. Data from Statista showed that in 2024, the number of gun deaths per 100,000 residents was 8.7 in the state. Rhode Island was the lowest at 3.1, while Mississippi was the highest at 29.7.

Daniel said Newsweek: “I feel very, very lucky, and an event like this really puts things into perspective for me, that life is precious and anything can happen at any time. And that Ikea bookcase saved my family’s life.”