Practical Doomsday by Michal Zalewski

Author:Michal Zalewski [Michal Zalewski]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: No Starch Press
Published: 2022-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Responding to Muggings and Home Invasions

Whether it’s a stranger barging into your car or home, or a thug roughing you up for your wallet and phone, violent confrontations are traumatic, dangerous, and—as discussed in Chapter 2—not exactly rare. To keep your cool and make sound decisions in the heat of the moment, you need a solid plan. In most cases, this plan needs to focus on de-escalation and avoidance, rather than on the survivalist fantasy of resolving every encounter with a single, well-placed karate chop.

An in-depth discussion of active defense strategies is the focus of Part IV of this book, but for now, let’s review several higher-level points about managing the risk. First, when it comes to muggings and other forms of street violence, many criminals exploit our instinct to comply with orders and desire to follow convention; for example, if they holler at you, you might be compelled to stop and let them close the distance—even if objectively, it’d make more sense to bail. Not being afraid to make an undignified retreat or raise your voice is a good survival strategy; so is maintaining keen situational awareness and avoiding getting lost in thought, especially in awkward transitional spaces such as back alleys, pedestrian underpasses and overpasses, empty gas stations, and so forth. Finally, it can be helpful to have several $10 or $20 bills in your pocket, and keep vital documents, credit cards, and keepsakes somewhere else.

Fighting is a possibility, too, but because of the inherent risk, it should be the option of last resort. To momentarily take control of the situation, it may be useful to say or do something that’s nonthreatening but catches the assailant off guard. Feigning a panic attack or saying something completely unexpected (“Hey, are you a friend of CJ’s? Pretty sure we met last year!”) can give you a second or two to pull out a can of pepper spray or start running as fast as you can. But as with hand-to-hand combat, such approaches need to be rehearsed to have any chance of working in real life.

For home intrusions, it’s good to map out different scenarios, deciding on the best course of action depending on the time of day and the apparent intent of the unwelcome guest. Some intruders may be dangerous, but in many other cases, you might be dealing with a drunk neighbor, a person suffering from dementia, or a skittish teenage perp who timed a burglary wrong. In many cases, responding with deadly force would be the wrong call.

In any situation that may involve self-defense, understanding the law is critical. We’ll talk about this a bit more in Part IV, but in principle, in the United States, residents don’t have a duty to retreat from their home, and can use deadly force if they have a reasonable and immediate reason to fear for their life or the lives of others.3 That said, the scope of these rules can vary, and there are differences in how the prosecutors and the

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