In December of last year, I was in Reno for the IDS Instructor Development course. Edgar and I rented an AirBnB for the instructor candidates, one of which was from Jalisco, Mexico. His name was Angel, and when we arrived at the AirBnB he was very surprised that the house we were staying in did not have a wall around it. He couldn’t believe that the front door of this house led straight into the living room.
American’s live in a peaceful society. You can argue if you want, but I’ve been to plenty of other parts of the world where having a wall around your dwelling is not only a good idea, it’s practically a requirement. Angel illustrated that with his disbelief that anyone would live in a house without more layers of security. In the US, finding a house with a wall around it is unusual in most areas. This is a reflection of the threat level that we live in. If walls were necessary, we would build them.
Yet even though we live in a peaceful society that doesn’t mean that plenty of bad things don’t happen. Our normal experiences can lead us into a false sense of security and lead to behaviors that are welcoming to a bad guy who wants to victimize us. In addition to making it easy for a bad guy to select us for an attack, we also in many ways lack the mindset to respond to a threat once it’s been presented.
In the following video, we are going to see all of these points illustrated. This video comes to us from Houston, Texas where a 72 year old woman and her 75 year old husband are robbed at gunpoint. The woman in this video is horrified and panicked at the sight of a gun in her face, and when her husband responds to her screams, he has no plan for self defense. They both left in a position to only try to negotiate with the criminal who holds the power of life and death over them.
We can see from the video the woman has little time to react. Even if she had seen him coming from further away, the bad guy is faster than she is. But once she does recognize the threat, she is essentially paralyzed into inaction. This kind of reaction is due in part to not mentally preparing yourself for this kind of situation. I wrote an article in our newspaper, the Guns For Everyone Gazette, last month about mental repetitions and why they are important.
The husband responds to the screaming and comes out to check on what is going on. He has a counter ambush opportunity as he comes outside as we can see the bad guy is not aware of his presence until he speaks. But instead of having the tools and skills needed to deal with the threat to his wife, all he is left with is his voice. Communication is a powerful skill in self defense but in this scenario, a gun would have been better.
What we see in this video is two people who don’t seem to have anything resembling a defensive mindset. This is the “it wouldn’t happen here” mindset, and it leaves them wholly unprepared.
Get trained, educate yourself, build your skills, think and act defensively. Make yourself harder to attack. You have a moral responsibility to be as prepared as is reasonable to defend yourself.
