This means you eschew the “Shoot Me First” styles, but ensure your body language says “Don’t F**k With Me”. The average non-criminal eye should slide right over you, and the average criminal eye should say to its owners that no, we really don’t want to follow that guy down yon darkened alley…

It is, I grant, a subtle distinction. You want to be un-Gray in terms of sending out the signal of “prey animal”, but you don’t want to be signalling anything noticeable or flamboyant, either.

Of course, once some idiot has opened up the ball, and is attacking you…? By all means, be noticeably flamboyant in your response. There is no such thing as excessive violence, when someone attacks you for no reason.

There was some attempted kidnapping awhile back, I think in Italy. Latin country, 1980s… The kidnappers were used to grabbing soft little kids from nannies and so forth, ones that would not resist. Then, they grabbed a little girl who turned out to be absolutely the Wrong Kid. She gouged eyes out, bit, screamed, clawed, and when it was done, two adult males were getting their asses beaten in by a crowd of little old ladies and children whose attention she’d drawn. I’m not kidding about the eyes, either–She hooked one guy’s eye right out of his skull, with malice aforethought. He went down, screaming, and stayed down. The report I read had pictures of both of the kidnappers after they were taken into protective custody, and it was not pretty. Ever see someone who has had their eye taken out? Optic nerve dangling, eyeball gone? A little girl did that, all by herself.

You do that when you’re attacked, you may well wind up dead, but you’re also not going to be dragged off to be murdered or raped somewhere else, either. Your choice–Be a victim, or be the person that your attacker really, really regrets cutting out of the herd.

The crooks of the world are looking for easy meat, not to get themselves hurt.

There’s also the factor that when they’re looking to do their little “tough guy” routines, they’re usually not thinking past their threat display, and when lethal force is deployed against them instead, then the ground shifts beneath their feet, and they’re put off balance past the point where they can cope.

I can’t remember where the hell I watched it, but there was a CCTV camera that caught a guy who was trying to assault/rape a woman, and she pulled out this gawdawful big knife from her purse, and proceeded to slash the hell out of him and stick it in him about a half-dozen times. The bastard was in such a state of shock that he just stood there and let her, with a look on his face that clearly expressed his bewilderment at the way things were not following his script. End of it all, he’s on his knees, bleeding out, and she’s calmly wiping the knife off on his shirt, sheathing it, and walking off.

Cops found the body there awhile later, after the corpse was thoroughly looted, and spent some time trying to figure out what the hell had happened to this guy. CCTV showed it from start to finish, and it wasn’t any more than about sixty seconds–The knife chick looked like she knew what she was about, and the knife she used on him was definitely some kind of purpose-made fighting knife. From what I could see, it looked about like a Randall # 1, or one of those copies they used to sell. Far as I know, they never identified the woman.

If you’re looking to kill someone who attacks you with the intent of “just” beating you up or hurting you, the difference in mindset is going to throw them waaaaaaaay off their game, once they realize what’s happening–Although, ideally, they should not figure that out until it’s too damn late.

2. Criminals are by nature latent cowards. They choose perhaps without even knowing so the prey that is the weakest and least capable of offering resistance. Animals in the wild do so also.