To say nothing of his fashion choices.
Everybody knows you wear ONE accent item of jewelery at a time. You don’t walk out of the house looking like you’re decorated like a christmas tree. Unless OP is Liberace.
The second paragraph belies the first (or vice versa :).)
What I’m saying is that, as described in the first paragraph, the knife the guy used on your cousin served its purpose perfectly. It took your cousin out of the fight and sent him into flight from fight. Other guy was being a prick by pressing the advantage. He should have let your cousin split.
Unless he was TRYING to kill your cousin - in which case press the attack. He didn’t so he wasn’t
As was noted later in thread. If you are untrained then the odds of hitting a “vital” point on an aggressively resisting opponent is minimal. You’ll most likely inflict “defensive wounds” and be bled on while getting your ass handed to you.
Think about it - whenever anything comes near your eyes, nose or throat you instinctively throw up an arm, dodge, or duck to avoid it. Most of the time the damage will be cosmetic and painful.
There’s a lot of people that can deal with that level of pain even when they aren’t mad.
If you pull it then charge and attack; or clinch pull it and use it. The best is practised quick draw and charge.
Never brandish - use it or leave it out of sight.
I apologize to all - I don’t know how to break up individual parts of a post to respond to them in sequence :o.
- I agree with you wholeheartedly. But you fail to take into account that bad shit does happen to good people. Do you need to be paranoid? No. Do you need to understand your area and the rules thereof? Yes.
Attacks and random crime happen (my cite is any news from any anywhere) so adapt to the level of threat and go about your day.
1a) So am I. I’ve backed off bigger guys than me just by not being scared of them. I’ve split from guys smaller than me because I was scared of them. I’ve done a number of “Mexican standoffs” with people of various shapes and sizes.
Small and skinny has nothing to do with it. Assertiveness with a healthy dose of self-preservation goes a long way - with or without a weapon.
- Were someone to say that exact same thing to me in real life my response would be, “Then you’re either baiting a confrontation or you’re a fucking moron. I’ll allow for mythically naïve.”
This is not real life so I will say, “Perhaps rethink your priorities re: survival.”
3c “I just actually managed to get a job at a store near me. The store is in a semi-sketchy area overall with a lot of rednecks and lower class people.”
Let’s parse this shall we?
“I just actually managed to get a job at a store near me.”
“just actually managed” suggests that you have trouble finding work. It sounds like you have been trying and repeatedly failing.
“The store is in a semi-sketchy area overall…” Dependant on your definition of “sketchy” this sounds like you had to take any job you were given.
It sounds like you are hardly in the professional position to say that your customers are composed of “…a lot of rednecks and lower class people.”
You, who have to take a job catering to them are superior exactly how?
You sound like an insecure dweeb who wants to find confidence in an external source.
If you were as good as you think you are you wouldn’t be in this position. You aren’t as good as you think you are and until you adjust perception to reality you never will be.
If we were to argue about diamond clarity you talk laps around me I’m sure. But if it were anything involving physicality - based on the impression you’ve given in this thread - you’re a victim and I’d wipe the floor with you.
I’m also non-violent by nature.
Read your environment. If you are in an affluent area wear your flashy shit. If you are going to the club, party or what-have-you in a vehicle not going through “the hood” then wear your flashy shit.
If you are going to WORK in a semi-sketchy area of town don’t wear flashy shit. Who are you trying to impress?
Are you fishing in the customer pond or are you just so insecure that you need to flash shit at all times?
Qft - except it is flee or attack. Run or kill. I advocate incapacitate and run but if it is meaningfully safer then attack to kill.
Again, qft.
Best bet is ensure that he can’t/ won’t chase you as you split. This isn’t a war this is getting home to your pop-tarts in one piece.
Having authoritatively responded to a bunch of people I’ll editorialize 
I am not a fighter. I don’t like to get hit or hurt. I’ve been in few real fights and the best I’ve done is drawn. I’ve only once pulled a knife on someone but I didn’t have to use it.
That being said I’ve watched and read a lot about fighting and fighting styles and it seems that given two untrained people the best strategy with a knife is to clinch and stab the side of the abdomen repeatedly and quickly.
You may not kill immediately but you WILL drop your opponent or make them want to disengage.
This will not help against escrimadors or anyone else trained in true knife fighting but it is reality.
Knives are dirty clinching weapons - useless on defense but brutal on proper offense.
Zeke
Sorry for any typos - missed the edit window 
I thought about this some more on my drive home tonight. I discussed it with a friend. We both agree that based on the mixed signals from the OP in this thread, we think the only realistic chances the OP has for protection are:
- Bodyguard
- A big dog
I am afraid that all of the other suggestions in this thread will, due to the OP’s unwillingness to hurt someone, result in the bad guy taking away what ever weapon the OP has, then shoving up their ass sideways. Then they will pull it out, and beat the OP over the head with it. This will be very painful.
So until the OP makes an actual decision, I suggest the following. Go buy a large caliber handgun. Load it with one bullet. Carry it with you. If someone tries to rob you, pull it out, point it at your head and pull the trigger. Your death will be quicker and less painful that way.
Or
Make the decision that you will be a willing victim or you are willing to fight to protect your life and property. Stop trying to straddle the fence.
The issue with a knife as a defensive weapon is that you need to get to contact range with your attacker. I grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood. In an argument that escalated into the physical, a guy attacked me with a faux mother of pearl Italian switchblade. I was quicker, and grabbed a half brick.
I still have that switchblade as was my right as the spoils of honorable combat. I use it as a letter opener.
Now, my Colt Defender .45acp pistol is my legal weapon of self defense.
Dunno about big-ass dude pumped up on steroids. My friend was just a skinny-ass army private, and after pepper-spray exposure in basic training, he told me that he could understand why pepper-spraying people just made them angry.
OP, you need to make a commitment.
You wouldn’t be asking for advice if you didn’t already acknowledge that the walk from your job to your car is potentially unsafe, and yet you want to continue wearing your expensive jewellery, and don’t really want to hurt your future mugger? You really need to make the decision to protect yourself or not.
The easy part is taking precautionary measures. I wouldn’t walk on a dark street in a sketchy part of town wearing a short skirt and high heels, so you should drop the jewellery - that’s just common sense. You can express your individuality when you go clubbing in a better part of town. Walking with a purpose with no phone or ear buds and being aware of your surroundings is all good advice.
The hard part is your mental attitude. Whatever weapon you decide on, do get some training. Hopefully they’ll instill an attitude of winning at all costs. We women are taught to scream “Back off”, punch 'em in the nose, gouge their eyes, do whatever it takes. You have to do the same in what could be a life or death situation.
The bad guy might knows where you work. If you taze or spray him, he’ll probably return a few nights later and beat the piss out of you.
I like the way you think. Face to face with a hungry lion, throw a steak away from your person, then get your person the hell away.
A knife is basically the worst combination of lethality and ineffectiveness. Any knife that you can reasonably carry on your person, and especially folding knives, just aren’t long enough to do assuredly disabling damage; essentially the only way to effectively disable someone with a small knife is a strike to the base of the skull or kidney; even severing a carotid or femoral arteries, or thrust into the thorax puncturing a lung will likely not disable an attacker within a few seconds and they may have minutes to continue to beat/stab/shoot/rape/whatever.
Although you rarely see this in movies, a deep stabbing wound with a knife will often capture the blade through hydraulic suction, making it almost impossible to pull back out with one hand, especially when that hand is already covered with blood. (The reason armies largely stopped mounting bayonets on rifles was because they would often stick in the body and get wedged between ribs rendering the rifle useless until the bayonet could be detached.) Using a knife effectively (and in a way that doesn’t pose as much hazard to the user as the assailant) requires some fairly extensive training, and actual edged weapons combat is a nasty business in which both parties are likely to seriously injured as my instructor (a former Recon Marine and edged weapons trainer for the Singapore Police Force) repeatedly pointed out. And there is, of course, the old saw about bringing a knife to a gunfight; if by pulling out a knife you escalate a situation to violence, you may have little recourse against a well-armed attacker.
As for pepper spray, I used to study at a dojo/self defense school (multi-art, based more on a practical application of Kenpo/Wang Chun/Jujitso/boxing than ring sparing; think more Krav Maga than Tae Kwon Do) where we did volunteer assertiveness/self-defense classes for women’s shelters and defense groups. One of the demos was on the effectiveness of OC spray. The instructor would give a large size 10% cannister (the kind with a pistol grip) to a woman with instructions to spray at his face and charge her from 30 feet. Only once out of about a dozen times I witnessed this was he not able to get the woman in a bear hug, and then only because the woman clubbed him on the temple with the can and dodged out of the way. Now, you can argue this wasn’t a realistic scenerio–that the attacker was prepared and knowledgable about the effects of the spray–but on the other hand the woman was far more prepared and had a larger, easy-to-use spray can rather than the small, hard to orient minicans most people carry. On the whole, I think it illustrates the point that OC can be effective in some situations, but you’d better be prepared to back it up with something stronger.
A Taser just isn’t a weapon I would rely upon by itself. Yes, the current generation of Taser weapons are quite effective if you get a good circuit, but if the attacker has heavy clothing this just isn’t assured. And with compact Taser like the C2, you have one shot. If it misses, or isn’t effective, you’re out of options. There is a reason that police officers carry duty pistols in addition to the issued Tasers, and you can look through police reports and get a notion of the number of times Taser weapons are deployed and prove to be ineffective, and not just against roided out muscleheads or PCP freaks. Police carry Tasers (often reluctantly) and pepper spray in order to give them less lethal options for dealing with a violent situation before it escalates to drawing and using a firearm with the attendant potential for life-altering consequences and hazard to bystanders, but they don’t carry only Tasers and spray, because those tools are limited in their effectiveness.
In general, people often seem to assume that they can buy a weapon of some kind and it will protect them. The reality is that any weapon is a tool, and its ultimate effectiveness (and safety) depends on the training and competence of the user, be it a baton, knife, pepper spray, firearm, or whathaveyou. And the vast majority of violence incidents can be avoided by just being aware and displaying assertiveness without even having to draw a weapon. But if you do get to that point, you will want the most effective weapon you can possibly carry, not the one that does least harm or is minimally effective on the notion that there is some kind of moral superiority in not intending to injure. If you are in a situation where you feel the need to defend yourself from a life-threatening attack, it is the result of someone else having made the decision that your wallet or jewelry or whatever is more valuable to them than your life, and holding the moral high ground does not translate into any kind of tactical advantage then and there.
Stranger
The scenario cited in the previous post for using pepper spray is not very realistic (presumably the “attacker” in this case knew enough to close his eyes and hold his breath and was determined to prove the contention that the spray is not effective).
If you catch an assailant/mugger by surprise and give them a good eye and snoot-full, I highly doubt they’re going to want to finish off their attack 11 times out of 12.
It might be overkill, but you can buy pepper spray products designed for hikers to repel angry bears (range supposedly up to 35 feet). I carried a bear spray like this in a velcro holster while hiking in Wyoming recently.* If this will work on a pissed-off 800-pound bear (and experts say it’s pretty effective), I suspect it will dissuade most human no-goods.
*I invested in the product after having an unexpected, very close encounter with a female black bear and her cub on a trail in the Tetons. Happily, she was not in an especially aggressive mood.
My cousin wasn’t a “determined attacker”, he was a kid in a fist fight that got stabbed. Point being nothing physically prevented him from continuing to fight from his injury. Not all attackers would back off so easily–which was the point with pepper spray as well, sometimes a face of it will deter an attacker, but it also can fail to deter an attacker.
I said a knife is useful if you charge you opponent and stab repeatedly into the side of the abdomen. How pepper spray comes into it I’m really not sure.
I don’t care how tough you are - if you get your liver, kidneys, belly opened up you will cease to be an effective opponent despite how determined you might be.
I accept that there are some very rare people who maintain effectiveness despite serious organ damage. I also insist that those people be considered outliers.
I’m not sure what training you think your cousin could have gotten to teach him to overcome and adapt to being knifed in the guts but I can assure you that training doesn’t exist.
The point is that the OP is a wussy-puff who wants to feel tough by packing something. No matter what he packs he’ll still get his ass handed to him because he is:
a) Stupid and vain - I’m not sure which breeds the other but wearing “expensive Jewelry” at a store “in a semi-sketchy” part of town is stupid and vain. To refuse to dress down because “why should I?” is begging for an asskicking.
b) Weak - The OP is someone who thinks a weapon makes him scary. He is wrong.
A weapon in the hands of a wussy-puff is worse than no weapon at all.
Carry a weapon with willingness to kill or don’t carry one. OP would wiggle it around to look scary and fail. <– But I’d bet he’d spit out some witticism just before spitting out some teeth.
As has already been pointed out, in untrained hands a knife can easily fail to do the kind of damage you postulate. Stranger did a good job explaining why, but also if the knife is a folding knife or even a switchblade (any knife that isn’t a fixed blade) you realistically get one stab max, not multiple. Lots of fixed bladed knives will also break on use or the force of the thrust will cause the untrained wielder to lose hold. Knives are not good self defense tools unless you’re really well trained in their use.
Even then there are many better tools. Old school (meaning hundreds of years ago) toughs who were well versed in blades likely carried a ton of them, much like dangerous men in the early gunpowder era would carry a “brace of pistols.”
Even multiple stab wounds with a knife are no guarantee of disabling an opponent quickly. Deep penetrating knife wounds are frequently fatal, but the cause of death is usually internal bleeding or infection, occurring hours or even days after receiving the wounds. And it is surprising to many how difficult it is to place a stab in an effective area; this article describes the most effective locations for a strike, and how difficult it may be to reach them. Realize, too, that in a fight against someone wielding a club or other long reach weapon, you’re going to have to aggressively move in and get in touching distance, which is something that has to be trained in. Most non-trained knife wielders try to stay back at a distance and sort of slash-flail or try to stab in with the arm extended, which is both ineffectual and subjects the knife arm to a striking or grappling attack with potential to lose control of the knife. Using a knife effectively means essentially moving inside the guard but not allowing yourself to be grappled, which is a neat trick if you can do it.
A folding pocket knife–even a automatic deployment blade with a reinforced tanto point and all the other tactical gooeyness that so-called combat knife makers dry to draw you in with–is an absolute last ditch weapon to be deployed only when you’ve run out of other options. My edged weapons instructor used to say that in a real edged weapons exchange, one combatant goes to the hospital and the other one goes to the morgue, and had the scars down both arms, neck, and face (and probably elsewhere on his body) to prove that he knew what he was talking about. To carry one with the illusion that it is going to provide effective defense without serious risk to your own life and limb is nothing but uninformed fantasy.
Stranger
Never been in a knife fight, but trained FMA for many years. No surprise that folk in martial arts/self defense would disagree! 
But I strongly disagree with folk who say a knife is not effective. Of course, that implies a good knife in the hands of someone who trains how to draw and use it.
I’m surprised at the references to stabbing, as we rarely stabbed with knives (or sticks.) Instead, we most often slashed repeatedly. We emphasized as realistic scenarios as possible, against single and multiple assailants, in open and confined spaces. In our practice, it was not at all difficult to get in several slashes to the limbs, throat, and trunk of a determined aggressor. Of course, you are not just swinging and stabbing a blade. You are using it in addition to footwwork and body mechanics to control distance.
Sure, nothing beats a gun for range and lethality. But IMHO (since that’s the forum we are in), a knife is just about the best leveller a woman could have against an unarmed man. I cannot emphasize enough, tho, that a knife is worse than useless if you do not train with it enough that it becomes second nature, and if you are not fully committed to using it should the situation arise.
I stopped training/fighting some years ago, primarily due to some injuries, but also due to an awareness that I could essentially eliminate any need for self defense by avoiding the few minimally risky situations I encountered. I am aware of my surroundings. I don’t spend much time in bars or in sketchy neighborhoods - especially at night. I don’t flip off or otherwise confront folk who irritate me while driving or elsewhere in public. I live in a really safe neighborhood. Not everyone is situated such that they have as boring a life as me!
I stopped carrying a blade because my job takes me in and out of federal buildings and courthouses too frequently, and the security became too much of a concern. Sure, someone could hit me over the head tonight as I walk my dog in my suburban neighborhood. But I think chances are likely greater that I’d develop cancer, get hit by a bus, or break my neck tripping down some stairs! 
After posting, I read the article you linked and your post more carefully. I think we likely agree more than disagree. My position is that a knife is very effective in the hands of a trained and committed fighter. And a trained tighter ought to be well aware of the need to control range, and deliver as much damage as quickly as possible while incurring as little damage as possible yourself. Yeah, knife vs stick has its own challenges - and potential advantages.
Anyone who thinks they can effectively defend themselves by simply purchasing some object, or attending some seminar, is mistaken, and would be far better served by changing their behaviors to reduce potential threats.
If no one can dissuade you from getting pepper spray, at least do this: buy two, and have a friend spray YOU with one of them under controlled circumstances. Don’t forget to take your contacts out first.
If you’re going to have it, you’d better know what it feels like, and how well it incapacitates you, because odds are you’re not going to escape the effects. If you know how it affects you, you’ll be better able to deal with it when it happens and get away.
My wife’s a probation officer, and they carry pepper spray on their field visits, but first the officers had to submit to being sprayed themselves. It makes sense.