Yeah, sure… There are a lot of cases where you see inept attackers not completing the assault, but to say that the times when those assaults didn’t complete was due to some universal rule about being able to establish dominance is entirely fallacious. It’s like observing a young lion or wolf going after prey, screwing up, and then casting the results of that encounter as some great universally applicable lesson for prey species. Meanwhile, off on another part of the veldt or the taiga, the adult example of that lion or wolf is taking down prey animal after prey animal with exquisite disregard to anything that led to the prey escaping the juvenile.

Most recorded human-on-human assaults are going to be more in line with the juvenile predator; they’re inept because the predator doesn’t have experience, yet. Give that predator experience, and they’re going to be exponentially more dangerous and effective. That young woman who frightened off her attacker by breaking his glasses? On an attack later along that pervert’s personal timeline, he’s going to a.) not wear glasses, and b.) be very careful to achieve a knock-out blow in the beginning. Same with the woman in the elevator: First time around, that young predator was embarrassed out of his attack. The next time, or the time after that…? He’s going to ignore her attempts to shame him into backing off, and may even react more poorly to them after the earlier shaming.

This is an egregiously bad line of reasoning, much like Grossman’s ideas. It is dangerous because it breeds overconfidence in the victim class, and it increases the likelihood of that victim class enabling what amounts to training effect for the predators. You want to prevent that elder lion from terrorizing your herd of gazelles, you need to take her down when she’s at the youthful inept stage, and prevent her from learning from her mistakes. Same-same with human criminals: Stop the training effect, before they learn from their early inept attempts at violent crime.

I have come to the belief, over the years, that instances of violence between humans in civilization need to be crushed in their infancy. Creatures like the Parkland shooter should have been dealt with far earlier, when they started demonstrating that they were dangerous in all the little things they did, and how they treated those around them. It’s like with serial killers–The time to deal with them is when they’re still in their “killing the neighbor’s cats” stage, not after they start on people…

Check out the Chevy Kehoe shoot-out on You Tube. Two trained shooters feet apart blazing away at one another and no rounds hitting. Both participants backing away from one another at the same time very typical of such encounters.