Have you ever considered the difference between being in a dangerous situation and being in one where you have limited response options?
I think a lot of us in the gun/self-protection world get those feelings confused.
I reached this conclusion on New Year’s Eve.
I’m spending a good chunk of the winter down in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. It’s a practice I started a few years ago and a holiday break that I really enjoy.
This year a friend joined me to celebrate the New Year’s holiday .
We enjoyed an amazing New Year’s Eve dinner and then walked to the biggest park in town to watch midnight fireworks and a drone show over the ocean.
The streets were closed to vehicles. There were about 100,000 people crammed into an area the size of two square blocks. It was incredibly crowded. More people per square foot than any other place I’ve ever been. It was truly insane.
The area where we were walking. This was before the drone show. It got even more crowded afterwards.
My internal mental warning alarms started going off. I leaned over to my friend and said “We need to get out of here. This is dangerous.” We moved to a nearby church courtyard that was far less crowded to wait for the deluge of people to move out of the area.
While we were waiting, my friend asked me “What did you see that was dangerous?” She seemed confused by my actions.
She went on to explain that the situation was not at all dangerous from her perspective:
– Most of the people were walking in family units. There weren’t any packs of “feral” teens causing problems. There were lots of parents and grandparents with young children.
– No one was displaying any weapons.
– There were a few inebriated people, but they weren’t causing problems.
– No one was acting irrationally or acting out in anger. There were no fights.
– The streets were super crowded, but all the people were moving calmly. No one was stampeding.
– There were lots of cops, military personnel, and emergency medical workers on the scene in case of an emergency.
– The general mood of the crowd was happy and festive.
After contemplation, I had to concede that she was correct. The most likely danger I faced was a mild burn from a five-year old who could lose control of his sparkler firework. So why were my mental alarm bells going off?
I realized that the scene wasn’t dangerous at all. Instead, my brain had problems with the fact that should something bad happen, my response options were very limited. Because of the extremely crowded roadways, I couldn’t get away quickly if things turned bad. Sure, I could turn into a 260-pound wrecking ball and knock some people over to escape, but that would require leaving my friend. She didn’t have the same crowd-defeating body mass.
We were planning on going to a nightclub after the fireworks display. I knew this particular club’s doormen screened all entrants with metal detectors and pat down searches. As I am in Mexico, I obviously didn’t have a firearm. I was dressed for the club security with a disguised canister of pepper spray and a small ceramic knife. I could do good work with both tools, but I didn’t have the same capacity for counter-violence I would had I been carrying my Glock 19.
I was essentially unable to flee and had a limited capacity to fight. That was what bothered me. It wasn’t that we were truly in danger. It was the fact that if something bad happened, my response options were limited.
While my response options were not optimal for me, I had to compare myself to all the other folks in the crowd. My companion and I are physically fit and mobile enough to move better than the average person. I have decades of empty hand fighting skills practice that gives me an advantage over most of the people in the crowd. Even with my limited weaponry, I was still carrying far more than most folks had.
I was actually in a pretty good spot, despite feeling like my response options were sub-optimal.
While having limited response options presents its own potential problem, it is not the same as being in real danger. Sometimes I think that those of us in the self -protection community should consider this fact more often.
