"Exactly right," I said, "Carrying a gun won't do you any good if you don't pay attention. The first thing you have to do is realize you live in a bad neighborhood."
"No I don't," he answered. "It's the Old City. It's well lit and..."
"Your roommate was robbed at gunpoint at your front door. You live in a bad neighborhood."
"It's not that bad! There are lots of people who live down here and..."
"One more time. You live next to the railroad tracks. Have you ever heard of anything good happening by the railroad tracks?"
Books. Bikes. Boomsticks.
“I only regret that I have but one face to palm for my country.”
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Quote of the Day:
Rich Hailey on Awareness Of Your Surroundings:
Well put. Situational awareness is absolutely indespensible anywhere.
ReplyDeleteBut you knew that...
The man's son sounds like a good friend of mine. He once asked me what type of pistol he should get for his home. The first thing I asked him is "what are you willing to do if someone breaks in and you pull that gun?"
ReplyDeleteHis answer - "I'll shoot him in the leg or something"
Gooooannn
I then proceeded to explain to him that unless he was willing to shoot to kill if given no other choice he shouldn't have a gun in the house. When he said he didn't want to kill anyone I told him that there's a difference between wanting to and being willing to.
I was ready to explain the problem with even hitting a target in the dark when under stress but he decided to wait, after which i offered to take him to the range so he could try out a few of mine.
A good range day was had by all .
Matt
Yeah. that sounds like the Old City. I wouldn't lurk nor live that close to the tracks, the Greyhound station, or the homeless mission in the Old City anymore. There's a thrill to being in a skeevy part of town when you're 20 that just seems like foolish risk-taking 5 years later.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, situational awareness is key. More so late at night in urban areas.
KsR
It is called thinning the herd. That or indoctrination. If you live that near poverty you either resolve to never be there or you embrace it. Sorry, kind of off post but the 20 year old thing got be going.
ReplyDeleteRight, thinning the herd, if you don't learn SITREP you will die by it.
This is all I've got to say about that.
ReplyDeletehttp://posterboard.tv/misc/newsom_christian.JPG
Blue dot is the crime scene, red dots are the body discoveries, green arrow is, roughly, my home.
Scale is missing, but arrow to dots is roughly 1/4-3/8 mile as the crow flies. And the surprising part is, I live in a very nice, homey looking neighborhood with no outward signs of problems, no abandoned properties, "crack homes", and there's a small, clean-looking Baptist church across the street from the entrance. And then you drive down Cecil ave. far enough for the treeline to thin, and you see the industrial park, the tracks, the ratty depressed housing, the interstate... Which would be easily visible from my backyard were I to do something as banal as climb a tree.
It's a thin veil, but it's very opaque, and I take great pains to ensure that someone doesn't sock me in the nose through it.
I'm not sure which is worse to see: people that won't accept that they live in a bad neighborhood, or people that think living in a "good neighborhood" makes them safe from harm.
ReplyDeleteAs for Dr. Strangegun's post, I can relate. In Chesapeake and Virginia Beach, Virginia, the good and bad neighborhoods are pretty far apart. But in Portsmouth and Norfolk, any good neighborhood is 0.5-1.0 mile away from some scary places.
"people that think living in a "good neighborhood" makes them safe from harm."
ReplyDeleteAnd that fact makes it the one point the original author makes that I really disagree with. Just because you're in a "good" neighborhood doesn't mean you can relax your awareness. As I pointed out in my own post on this:
While crime happens more frequently in "bad neighborhoods" (which is usually why they're considered bad neighborhoods), it's certainly not limited to bad neighborhoods. This could have happened in the most upscale, hoity-toity part of Beverly Hills or the most run down part of Detroit. This one incident, by itself, doesn't make it a bad neighborhood. Crime knows no boundaries.
To me, the most important advice from the original poster is "The first step in self defense is being aware of your surroundings."
Everything else follows from that.