Hey, they invite you to tell 'em your stories...
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Okay - It was Friday night, and I'd just gotten off work - It'd been pretty ugly - almost 80 hours on the clock since Sunday, but that's life in the corporate jungle... I decided I really NEEDED to do some Grateful Dead, so I headed downtown to a pub that featured cover bands... I'm walking through the relatively well lit parking lot, when a guy walked up, and robbed me. Since I'm pretty good sized, I didn't want to make him any more nervous than he was already, so I just told him to take whatever, I wouldn't do anything - I politely requested that he drop my wallet/ID where it'd be found. Never saw it again...
Never mug a graphic designer. We do damn fine identikit pictures. The SOB was sentenced to 30 years... It turned out he'd also walked into a hair salon, got his hair cut, and then held up the place _and_ the customers...
Okay, now for the FUN part... When this guy (I found out later that he was 28 years old - He was less than three months out of jail, after serving 13 years - which means he did something as a juvenile to warrant being tried as an adult) walked up to me, he managed, with some problems, to yank a .38 revolver out of his pants - the external hammer caught on his trousers. Now, since he was a convicted felon, it was illegal for him to have this revolver (a 4" S&W Model 10 .38 Special, with fairly heavy wear - I got a REAL good look at it), not to mention that nobody in this state is allowed to carry concealed weapons. For some reason, however, those existing laws didn't do all that much to stop him.
I was left standing there, sincerely hoping that he'd injure himself (yeah, I was HOPING that another human being would be injured - how would YOU feel in that situation?), but he was too far away to hit, and to close to run from (especially with a disability). In the 5-10 seconds that he struggled with getting the thing out of his pants, I must have weighed those two options a hundred times...
But now I've got a third option. Guess what? I went out and bought a gun. And I've been trained in its use, and I have to say that I'm a pretty good student. In fact, I now shoot in competition at the national level. I'm neither a danger to myself nor to others. I don't normally carry a firearm, but then again, I also don't go downtown anymore unless I absolutely have to, since there's no legal CCW in this state. But the option's there. In my mind, it's better to have the freedom of choice about whether you will be able to defend yourself than it is to be denied that freedom.
I do not advocate gun violence. I _do_ advocate people being allowed to protect themselves from some of the predatory people who are being released from prison so that we can incarcerate folks with mandatory sentences for smoking pot... There's a difference there... I hope you can understand it.
Oh, and for what it's worth, after I was mugged, I went in the pub, and called the police. The first car that showed up, about 10 minutes later, told me that I wasn't in their district, and that the line was "over there." The next car that showed up, in an additional 15 or so minutes, was kind enough to stick around for a few minutes and take a report, and tell me who to contact to set up the meeting to do an identikit picture (which I had to take time off from work for, unreimbursed - but what the heck - we're talking about justice here...).
I found out a couple of years after, that this sort of behavior in cops is relatively normal - I was helping a friend rehab a 3-story house in the city when a car pulled up outside, a young man emerged, and proceded to fire 6 9mm rounds at the house across the street, which was the dwelling of a young man who'd recently been attempting to establish himself in business as an unlicensed and unregulated recreational pharmaceutical salesperson, at least until he was apprehended by the local constabulary. I assume that the assault upon his place of business was likely from his business associates, and was designed to reinforce the necessity of keeping trade secrets secret, especially from said constabulary... but I digress... Anywho, I had the house's portable phone in my pocket. I had 911 dialed before the last cartridge casing hit the pavement. I described the car (I was too far away on the third floor to see the license plate), and told the cops I'd be outside... After around 20 minutes, they pulled up. They didn't want to get out of the car. They didn't want to believe that anyone had been shooting anything. When I pointed out the casings on the road, they started giving me a hard time... They didn't even walk up to the house to see if everyone was okay... Sure increases your confidence... Remember - If you carry a cell phone, it isn't going to help you - Of course, maybe if you order a pizza, and Domino's delivers, you'll have something to keep the cops' attention when they arrive...
"I LIE" 
