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Originally Posted by dksuddeth
The problem with the attitude of 'he only wants money and if I submit, he'll leave after he gets what he wants' is that you only get to make the mistake of 'trusting' the person who has just threatened your life with not actually killing you one time and one time only.
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How many times do you get mugged in a week?
Odds on are that I'll only have to make that decision once anyway, if at all. And should that situation occur, the odds are that the guy I'm looking at is probably not a cold-blooded killer; they're really not that common. It strikes me that the probability is also high that he's very tense and quite probably more than a little desperate. Most of what's in my wallet is a bunch of plastic that I can cancel with half a dozen phone calls. If he wants forty bucks and a couple receipts, he can have 'em. My life is worth more.
These seems like pretty basic psychology to me. If you threaten a guy who's already tense, he's likely to react react violently.
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Originally Posted by MSD
It's intuition and analysis of the situation. Displaying a weapon is not escalating because you don't draw a gun during a mugging or robbery if you don't intend to use it. Drawing the gun is intent to use lethal force and you just don't do it unless there's no other option. There's a difference between "give me your wallet" and "I'm gonna kill you." Even with your small town lifestyle, I think you could look at someone and make an educated guess about whether or not tossing your wallet to a mugger would end the incident.
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Granted that's true. On the other hand, it strikes me that if the guy is really intent on doing me in I'm probably not going to have much chance of defending myself anyway. Think about it; if someone decides that they're going to go out and kill a person, that someone is unlikely to declare a formal duel and give you ten paces. I'm all too aware that I'm not Superman, and that if someone with a gun decided that they wanted to kill me they could in all probability do it before I had a chance to react anyway.
So we have mugger who doesn't intend to kill me but is a bit high strung and guy who decides that I need to die and finishes me off before I even know he's there. We have me, who knows to take basic precautions like locking my door and avoiding high risk situations. Where in any of this does having a gun decrease my chances of being hurt?
In a few isolated cases, having a gun may help. It just seems to me that the potential for harm is greater than is merited by the benefit provided. Carrying a gun may make you feel safer, but I've never been convinced that it actually makes you any safer than the rest of us. The handful of anecdotes in this thread seem to reinforce that idea rather than dispel it; none of them seem to make any sort of a strong case that these people would have been any safer with a firearm in their pocket, purse or vehicle.
Bad stuff happens to good people. Bad people make it happen sometimes. The world isn't a nice place, which is something I've long since accepted. I take what precautions I consider reasonable and console myself with the idea that the odds of me actually being involved in something like this are quite low. I just don't see the sense in living my life in fear.