Apologies for the delay, been at parents' place for a while (father is away working, mother wanted to visit her sister in IoM).
I'm not afraid of anything, sorry if that bothers you. Thought about it long and hard quite a lot at various times for several reasons. It may be that my faith (or lack thereof, as the case is) has something to do with this, it might be irrelevant - I am still not sure. In any case, it's not because I am convinced I would always prevail, it's because it actually makes no real difference whether I do or do not. I will either succeed or I will fail; if I fail I will not be around to worry about it, in a life/death choice. If I succeed, great. In neither case does fear aid me, it's generally considered to be a hindrance and I am not worried about the outcome in a way that will cause me to feel fear. Excitement if the stakes are high, but not fear.
If someone put a gun to my head, I'd seriously injure, if not outright kill them. Assuming I was aware that they had just done so. The issue of why they stand a good chance of losing that particular scenario has been done to death elsewhere, but in short, they are too close to keep the weapon on target and there are literally hundreds of ways for me to injure and ultimately kill them whilst immediately making myself a very difficult or impossible to hit target.
If you have good situational awareness you always make most of the choices regarding your personal safety not least of which is knowing when you are somewhere it is not good to be right at that moment. There are plenty of contrived scenarios where you people are asked "what would you do if...?" but in point of fact, if someone tries to attack you with a melee weapon, improvised or otherwise, you have usually had ample warning of their intention and therefore can choose the range or more sensibly choose to get the hell away without even fighting, unless that really is impossible. If it is crowded, by the way, they will not be using melee weapons - it requires a lot of space to swing and more than many people realize to thrust with all but the smallest knife. For the same reason, high spinning kicks are not used much even by people who are confident enough to try it - there is rarely the space. Indeed, when most people have to get "down and dirty" (and be honest; most never will have to) it is going to be very close range, involve a lot of punching, elbowing and employing of any improvised weapon that can be used well at point blank range (ashtrays are good, glasses can be). You don't need to profile 500 people because at most 20 are close enough to see you, much less attempt to attack you and people are rarely attacked in large public crowds anyway for obvious reasons. This is especially true of any scenario involving a weapon.
Distance does creat safety. Unless s/he uses a ranged (read: gun, in most cases) weapon, your phantom attacker has to get within at least 12 more likely 6 feet of you to have any hope of attacking you with even a large melee weapon, such as a pool cue, baseball bat, etc, without you or someone else being very much aware and able to simply run away, pull a gun, or whatever your choice is to be. Outside of guerrilla warfare people are not ambushed with "deployed" weapons. If you have distance and he is not firing/throwing something at you, the nastiest weapon he has is name-calling.
John
