The 5 W's of Personal Defense - Where?

The fourth W, where. Where are these things going to happen? Where. It's tempting to say anywhere, violence can meet us anywhere. And to a certain extent that's true. You know, for the longest time the focus has been on controlling your whereabouts. Don't go to dangerous places. Dangerous places are harder and harder to define. I mean, we're a mobile society and sometimes danger comes to us, especially if you aggregate well-to-do people in an area, you attract a certain class of criminal predation. That's there for that very reason, it becomes a resource pool. So, is a safe area safe, when we've made it an attracted? Think about areas overseas that attract, say terrorists, as a violent criminal actor. Very, terribly safe and full of wealthy shoppers. True. All right. So thinking about categories of places I think is more important what is the risk exposure? And what's the payoff? You know, as part of our daily lives, we want to do things that might take place in an environment that we wouldn't go to. Let's say in a certain company, it wouldn't take a small child to, you know to a performance art piece in a sketchy neighborhood. But I would certainly go myself, making other allowances for safety and security. And that comes down to the idea of you can't always carry a gun. You know, if you can always carry a gun, I always say you're probably missing out on some things. You know, if you live that way, if you don't go out with your friends and you know if you choose not to drink alcohol, great. But if you choose not to go out with people, you don't go to parties, you don't go to shows, you don't go to cities, you don't get on a plane, again I think these limitations on where don't necessarily isolate you from violence. No, and my feeling is that it's more of, at this point, it's more of a fetish. I've heard people say, "I won't go anywhere where I can't carry my gun". What if you have to go to court. Right. You know, these sorts of things come up all the time. But moreover, the point of safety and security awareness and risk awareness is to be able to do what you want to do, is to be able to have the life you want to have, not to have a truncated life where you're either at the range or at home reloading. Right. We want to be able to go wherever we want. But, an important way to think about places, and this is a struggle for some people because it requires the perspective of the violent criminal actor. Is this a location of a good yield? Is this a place where a violent criminal actor would come looking for a successful predation, or a place where there's someone I can prey on. And that's unusual for most of us. We think of places in terms of safety. But if you take the perspective the violent criminal actor, it changes how you look at quite a few of these places. We did a project a couple years ago in regard to hunter safety and hunters being interested in personal defense. And the idea was, you know, how could a hunter be in danger? Well, they know that they're going to get a rifle, maybe a shotgun. They're going to get a, maybe the guy's got a nice truck, he's parked out in the middle of nowhere, he's isolated. And all of a sudden there was a spree of robberies, not much violence but a spree of armed robberies against hunters because of knowing they would pick up a firearm, knowing they would pick up a vehicle. Mm hm, whereas walking down Main Street at noon, a man carrying a shotgun would be perceived as a threat. Walking through the woods at five in the morning, he's not a threat at all. He's the guy from the next blind over. Exactly. And so that changes the where quite a bit, because of the behavior of the violent criminal actor in that context fits the where. And again, much like the when, a place chosen by a violent criminal actor is going to advantage him or her and disadvantage us, intentionally Now, when and where obviously inextricably tied together. When someone is in a situation, or when a place presents a situation. Irregardless of our preconceptions about that time and place, that's really what the criminal actor is going to be looking at. Absolutely. If you listen to John Hearn's fabulous talk about the Newhall shootings, The distance between when the California Highway Patrol Mens' lights came on in their car to the traffic stopping and the actual gunfight was over a mile. It wasn't a chase. They were just ambling, not trying to get away, looking for a spot that suited them. Not a spot that suited the police. And we would like to think that had those officers had a better sense of the risks they were encountering, why would this person be driving? He's driving for a spot that advantages and disadvantages us. Their behavior would have been very different. I'd like to learn from that kind of thinking. How much of a role... I think this is a good time to talk about something that I think is a huge precursor to violence and predation, which is isolation. You may be at the mall, the example you spoke of earlier but you're alone in the parking lot for that period of time. You're hunting, you're out, you're alone at the watering hole. It's not in the middle of the convenience store, it's coming and going to and from the car at the gas station. Well, some of the watering hole dynamic actually does translate very well from kind of an animal kingdom to a human kingdom. The vast majority of the animals at a watering hole that are not attacked are not going to stay around and help. Right. They are going to flee. They're going to flee the predation. And that happens with humans too. When the shooting starts at the middle of the night convenience store, no one who's not being shot at is going to stick around. And so that element, I think holds true. But more than individual isolation, which is sort of situational, social isolation is a much bigger risk. People who don't engage with others, don't make a mark on others, they don't enter into people's social space, that kind of person who can come into a room and leave and you don't even remember they were there. They don't engage well with others, and violent criminal actors have a very keen eye for that. That is a clear go signal. Someone is awkward, socially. Ineffective socially, we would say. So the where can't be pinned down on a map. It really is situational. And you need to be aware all the time.