For once, your failure to live up to expectations makes me pleased.
Low? It’s murder, in many countries.
Congratulations, Paul. You just advocated 2nd Degree Murder.
No wonder gun owners have such a bad rep.
I have no ethical problems with turning on a potential mugger with gun in hand (not pointed) and saying, “Yes, what can I do for you?”
If Mr. Mugger persists in attempting to obtain my wallet with the threat of force, I’d make sure he got a very good look at the gun in my hand, especially the diameter of the bore. He’d probably hear some words to the effect of, “Fuck off, asshole.”
If he still persisted, I’d consider it an almost moral obligation to cleanse the gene pool of this retard by putting two in the ten-ring, and calling it self defense.
If said mugger got the drop on me before I could clear leather, I’d meekly hand the wallet over, and then mug him back when he turned to leave.
But cold-bloodedly shooting a mugger in the back without warning?
I cannot conceive af any American legal jurisdiction where this would be legally justifiable under any circumstance other than insanity.
I believe it was the only $12.85 federal offense committed that year…
I was utterly uninterested in any law enforcement sequel–it was my ownfault
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I heard the guy coming up on my while I was sorting through my junk mail–had I been packing, I would have looked up sooner, but I wasn’t and I sensed the approach of a panhandler, not an armed robber, but that was because too many years of california sunshine had eroded my brooklyn instincts, so I stood there like Buster Pointdexter. Basically, in practical terms, the post office at that time was an alley.
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I had no business getting my mail then, let alone hanging around thowing unwanted catalogs into the post office refuse.
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If I insisted on the practice, the least I could do was carry my chief’s special, which was back home doing me no good whatsoever.
(disclaimer:I am certainly not proposing, retrospectively, that the encounter would have been happier if I had been packing and blown the guy away–but that’s after the fact.)
My true life experience:
I was leaving the fabric store at a strip mall with a large parking lot in the day time. Nothing looked out of place.
As I was about to get into my car (I had my keys ready), another car pulled up beside me and a man with a gun leaned over to the passenger side of the car with a gun pointed at me and asked for my purse.
At first I didn’t see the gun and I didn’t understand him, so I said, “I beg your pardon?”
He asked for my purse again and this time I heard the word “purse” about the time I saw the gun.
I just somehow put myself on automatic. I said, “Sure, but can I just give you my wallet? This is my favorite purse.”
He said, “OK.” So I handed him the wallet.
I think I had $17 dollars in it. So he asked to see the whole purse. I said, “Will you give it back?”
He said that he would.
As I handed it to him, I said, “I’m not even looking at your face.” (Actually I was looking at the side of the car for any identifying marks.)
He gave me the purse back. I said, “Thank you and God bless.” And left.
I watched to see which way he went on the main artery and called the police with a description of the vehicle. There was a big car chase through Nashville with a helicopter and everything. (He had hijacked the car and robbed still a third person.) They caught him and he was sent away for twelve years.
I think my teaching experience helped to keep me calm.
I don’t think that armed robbery is always about power. And there is a lot of difference in the man who robbed me and in some of the viler scumbags who do enjoy the power trip.
One tip about parking: Don’t park next to a van. If one parks next to you and someone is sitting in it when you are ready to go to your car to leave, ask a security guard or a store employee to escort you.
Also, follow your instincts about people. I just knew I was being stalked once in an antique mall and asked for assistance when going to my car. Sure enough, the guy followed me anyway when I left, but I managed to lose him in traffic. Someone who looked just like this guy was arrested for stalking women in local parking lots recently. He had rope, handcuffs and a cow prod in his van.
It is a good theory because it is true, and the odds are even much much better than what you say. There are 2 kinds of people who will accost you, those that are just trying to make some money, and those that have other more evil intentions.
IF you are approached by someone who just wants your money, then by running away, there is very little chance he will shoot at you at all, since he already has what he wants and he never wanted anything more in the first place. By removing yourself from his presence, you eliminate any chance of escalating the situation.
If you are approached by someone who really wants to hurt you or kill you or rape you, then you most likley will be hurt by remaining close to him. If you are running away a moving target that is getting smaller and smaller each second, you have less chance of being hurt than if he is right up next to you.
I see a lot of newspaper stories of missing women, strangled women, raped women, knifed women, and just plain dead women’s bodies or bones, but it is quite and very rare to read of anyone who was shot and wounded while running away, or a dead woman found shot in the back lying on a city street.
If criminals habitually shot at people who were running away, we would hear stories of such happenings. We hear lots of stories of people getting hurt by staying close to the criminal, but almost never hear of people being shot at while running away.
What was the last time you heard a tv news story of someone who was shot at while running away?
Erroneous logic. We don’t here about people injured while running away simply because very few people run away.
Faint. If they shoot you while you’re down, they would have shot you anyway.
If someone points a gun at you, roll your eyes back into your head, throwing your head back slightly, and fall to the ground. Be sure to land your head on your arm, facing the ground. Men, have your wallet pocket up. Women, drop your purse, and keep your legs together as best you can (don’t fall down spread eagled). Don’t move until you’re sure it’s safe.
If they want to take you somewhere, they’ll have to carry you – be prepared to fight. If they want to molest you somehow while you’re lying there, be prepared to fight.
I think you are using faulty logic. Maybe we dont hear of any news stories of people running away, because it is not “news” for people to be not injured.
What kind of a headline television news story would it be for a newscaster to start out: "We have lots of news on the war in Iraq, the latest numbers on unemployment, a new cancer cure, and the return of the Messiah, but first, we will interview a 30 year old Denver man was not hurt nor injured today, after throwing down his wallet and running away, and then interview two women from Colorado Springs who also were not hurt in any way and were not raped after one woman threw her keys at a carjacker, and the other threw her purse and ran away. "
It has long been known, to lots and lots of people, to throw your keys, purse, or wallet at a mugger and then run away. I cant believe that no one does this.
On the other hand, I can believe that how ever many try it, that they are not killed/shot in the back. I really cant believe that too many muggers can shoot a handgun very well at a running away target. It is hard enough for trained police officers to make a lethal shot at a target running away and they have all the practice range time that they want.
How many muggers are good enough shots to make a killing shot at a runaway target, and why would they even want to shoot after they got the money/car that they wanted?
I pointed out a long time ago in this thread that when staring down the barrel of a gun, most people become automatons. They do what they’re told to do. They don’t act with a flash of inspiration, nor do they do what their friends suggested would be a ‘really good idea’ once upon a time.
I can’t speak for the people that live in England, maybe they are that way, but in America, I would expect the unpredictable.
A mugger over here has no idea if his intended victim is going to resist, try to take the gun away, pull out a gun of his own, or run away. Speaking for myself, I would not choose to remain anywhere near someone who threatens me. If he trys to shoot me running away after he gets all my money, just what do you think he would do if I stayed there next to him? If someone is thought to be dangerous, why stay close to him?
Of all the possible outcomes that an American mugger might think could happen before he commits his crime, a victim running away from him is probably the least likely to make him want to shoot at his intended victim.
Anyways, the posted question is " How should one react?"
I dont think the original poster wants an answer of “act like a automaton”.
I also don’t think that running away from danger is an unusual or an atypical reaction, in America anyways.
I’d be afraid of startling or angering my attacker by simply bolting. Sudden moves seem to invite sudden responses.
Look at it from the muggers point of view.
He got his money.
He got the car keys and all the credit cards. He didnt have to fight anybody, or wrestle with someone who tried to resist. He didn’t have someone shooting back at him. He didnt have anyone screaming for help and alerting the whole neighborhood. He finished his job hastle free, quietly, nice and clean and with no trouble.
He successfully finished his job, he made his money, he got off scott free and can now make his getaway without anyone else noticing what has happened. Even if he gets caught later, which would be unlikely since he didnt even have to fire a shot and make a lot of noise, it is a not very serious crime so his prison time would be little.
Why would he then want to shoot and maybe kill someone running away from him as fast as possible, alerting the entire neigborhood of what has just happened, and get the electric chair after he already got what he originally wanted?
Hypothetically, if he just wanted to shoot you and make a lot of noise, he didnt have to ask you for your money first, he could have just shot you first and then took the wallet off of your dead body.
Criminals might be bad, but they are not stupid.
Yeah. If this guy came up to me, I would run away, put as much distance between him and me.
“Acting like an autotron” with guys like this one will only end up with you in handcuffs in the back of his van.
The OP did not make it a geographic-specific question. Nor was there even a ‘location’ identifier.
Secondly, I said that people become an automaton. It was not an answer to the OP, but an explanation as to why the OP can become irrelevant in the very scenarios it hopes to deal with. Everything you’ve told yourself you would do, that the media have told you, that friends’ experiences suggests, it all goes out of the window. Get yourself into that situation, and you’ll understand.
Automaton, and not ‘autotron’, which Google suggests is the preserve of car repair shops. And your logic that a single extreme case of one individual should somehow represent the general behaviour of armed robbers (which that one evidently wasn’t anyway) leaves a lot to be desired.
I thought you were talking about running before he got the money. But even simply bolting aftewards could startle him. I guess what I’m saying is a startled person isn’t thinking clearly. As it is, the mugger may be pretty scared himself, and easily spooked. It just seems like being very calm, slow, and deliberate is the best way not to make him jump and do something stupid.
Not replying to anybody at all
Can I please repeat a paraphrase of advice given to me after an armed robbery, both by the police, and by acquaintances who had a more-than-passing knowledge of the gun crime in the area:
“You did everything right”. We walked home (3/4 mile) along a main road, in a group of three.
“You were right, but it would have made no difference”. The guys were walking at the same pace as us, ahead of us. By the time we clocked this, we were as far from any help as we were in the other direction.
It went without saying that handing over a couple of wallets, and the kids running off, was the right course of action.
We walked back to a nearby hospital entrance (closed at night) and called the emergency number.
I got put in with the armed response team, the women were taken back to the station (damn sexism…hell, I made the phone call 
)… drove around for an hour. Obviously described the whole thing to them…their reaction was ‘if we weren’t dealign with you, we’d be dealing with the next people to walk down that road’.
After that, the usual formalities…
Separate and independent, talking to a friend who has ummmm a knowledge of the situation (not illegally, but in a trying-to-make-things-better way). He says that our actions lost us the £50 cash that was in our wallets. He says he’d stand his ground, and say ‘go on, shoot me’. (Unfortunatley, this is applicable only in countries with strict gun laws, where black-market ammunition can be worth more than the weapons.) He has the statistics to back it up (and they’re 100-0 ratings) that unarmed unconfrontational robbery victims refusing to cooperation recieve no firearm injuries. And also the statistics in the part of the city of ‘true bystanders’ in shootings (meaning people who had no relation whatsoever with the gunmen) who got hit - two in ten years. Compared to a shooting every week or two.
Originally Posted by carolynnjulie
“Acting like an autotron” with guys like this one will only end up with you in handcuffs in the back of his van.
No, but geographics make a difference. A mugger in the United States has a myriad of possible reactions that an intended victim might take, including shooting back. Thus, Thowing your money, watch, and car keys and then running away greatly relieves most muggers, and dissapates their anxieties.
No, it is not a single case of ending up in handcuffs in the back of a van.
The thousands of women who end up missing, or raped, or dead each year are the many examples of people who did not run away when confronted.
I’d like to see some statistics on that.
I agree with most of what you say, CLJ, but a couple of points:
Armed robbery should be considered a serious crime; the risk of death or injury to victims is high, and IMHO, unacceptable. Crimes using handguns should be punished severely, to cut down on handgun crimes. Works better than taking them away from honest folk, per the statistics.
Criminals may be knowledgable about their profession, but their profession is stupid. Eventually, in MOST cases, it catches up to them. A very few get away with a career in crime. FWIW.