I’m pretty sure any competent self defense expert would disagree with you. If a guy says “your money or your life” it’s not smart to give him more reason to choose your life.
That’s not even remotely what I’ve argued. Why are you so upset about this that you’re putting words in my mouth?
and he did it all without losing his hat!
I don’t advise anyone to ever take on someone with a gun, it’s just never worth the risk of death or injury (to yourself or others). That being said, in this particular instance mustache man and the butchers resolved the situation without anyone dying. If you wanna give these guys shit for it go ahead, but it’s already a done deal and no one was hurt. And again, i stress, this is something one should not do but i applaud them for their bravery. Or foolishness.
Not being a competent self defense expert, I wouldn’t know. But I do know enough not to criticize someone for reacting to having a gun pointed at them.
Is that what happened here? It looked to me like he was robbing the store and then decided to threaten a patron with a gun for good measure. Again, I’m not Bruce Lee but it seems to me that once you point a gun at someone, you can expect the fight or flight reaction to take hold. Too bad for him he didn’t have your self control.
how much have you blamed the guman for doing wrong?
How much anyone else?
Check your maths.
Tone policing. No thank you.
Have described my own impression of your arguments as presented by you, to you, and summarized your arguments by volume and count - but have not misquoted you.
He was doing crowd control, which should be expected in any armed robbery. He wasn’t doing it well, but he was trying to impress upon mustache the importance of not doing anything stupid (which mustache went ahead and did anyway).
I’m not sure what I’d do in such a situation because I’ve never been in it but I sincerely hope I wouldn’t put the lives of bystanders at risk to play hero.
expert advice on the subject; if you disagree, please state your credentials:
http://kevincoffey.com/security/how_to_protect_yourself_from_armed_robbery.htm
Sign-In Form (check the “Response to Robbery” section
My last reply to you because you seem to be trying to make this personal when it’s really not.
I never said anything about what the gunman did or didn’t do wrong in the first place. My comments were purely about the actions of mustache.
I think it goes without saying that armed robbery is bad and that people shouldn’t do it. I don’t think anyone argued otherwise. (Since you need me to make it explicit, though: the gunman was very very bad. Very very bad indeed. He should not have done what he did. Fie on the gunman I say!)
But people have been acting as though mustache is really heroic and courageous. I want to impress on everyone that his actions were stupid. I want to do this because if anyone takes it to heart it may very well save someone’s life.
It’s not “tone policing” to correct false accusations about oneself. If you don’t want to be corrected, stop making stuff up.
Take a walk, junior. Grownups are talking.
I don’t know enough to disagree. Somehow I suspect the elderly man in this video has seen more actual conflict than most of the experts people like to quote. For some reason I get the distinct feeling that this man knew exactly how to respond to the situation. He seemed familiar with it and reacted well. I wonder about his credentials.
While we can hem haw about what might have happened, we can’t ignore the actual outcome in favor of what we might imagine. We also need to check our assumptions when we say that he placed peoples lives in danger. We don’t know what the gunman had in mind. He may have been planning to kill them all. He may have been planning to share the loot with them. We simply have no way of knowing so to suggest the old man rather than the person with the gun put anyone at risk is baseless speculation which tends to paint the gentleman as the problem when any reasonable person would say the gunman is to blame.
No. If he knew how to respond to the situation then he wouldn’t have started wrestling a guy with a gun in his hand.
I just want to make it as clear as possible that wrestling a guy with a gun in his hand is always a bad idea. I mean, if it’s just you and the gunman then fine – you’re taking your own life in your hands, and I think that’s your right. But there were like half a dozen other people in there whose lives mustache risked by laying hands on the gunman.
If you think that there’s situations like this where wrestling a guy with a gun in his hand is a good idea, then I’d request that you cite some sources on that. I double checked my assertions against police recommendations and security expert recommendations, which I think is a pretty good source. If you find better then I’ll happily concede the argument. Otherwise, I think your perspective is wrong, bad, dangerous, and puts people at risk.
My assumption that he placed peoples lives in danger is a sound one based on both reason and the experience of experts in the fields of security and law enforcement. This assumption is consistent with the fact that in this instance no one got hurt, because while the man’s actions vastly increased the risk of something bad happening, they did not ensure that something bad would happen. He rolled the dice and won. But he staked the lives of other innocent people on that die roll, and I think that is egregiously uncool.
It’s possible, but very unlikely. This is about risk again. There is some risk in letting the gunman go through the robbery. The risk that an armed robber will randomly commit homicide if unprovoked and allowed to proceed with the robbery is lower than the risk that an armed robber will commit homicide if attacked by one of his victims.
This is a completely rational and sensible approach to deciding what to do during an armed robbery and accords well with the recommendations of experts in the field.
All that set, you are exactly correct when you said that fight or flight instinct is in play when a robber starts waving a gun around, and yes no doubt mustache was inspired to stupidity by some very strong emotions.
Nonetheless, I’d like to strongly recommend against anyone imitating mustache because I honestly and sincerely think that he increased the risk of someone dying, and I would prefer people not die because of stupid decisions like that.
When robber turns his back at the 7 second mark, the gun is pointed at another patron.
Only if we accept your assumption that the gunman would not have killed everyone anyway. But we can’t do that can we?
I’d like to cite mustachio man as a source. Worked out great for him. Don’t you agree?
So we know then that this man has no experience in dealing with people pointing guns at him. And we are going to accept the tactics of law enforcement as reasonable when they gun people down for playing in the park and body slam women for daring to ask for a fork? I question the validity of your expert testimony.
So then your problem with the old fellow is his failure to already know and apply the recommendations of experts with less life experience than he so that means we need to call the man stupid right?
To make a completely equivalent argument, suppose that I said that it was very stupid for some to drive drunk. Your response would apparently be:
“Only if we accept you assumption that if the person had been completely sober they wouldn’t have gotten in an accident anyway. But we can’t do that can we? (Obviously sober people get in car accidents every day.) I’d like to cite the drunk driver as a source. He didn’t get in an accident, so it worked out great for him. Don’t you agree?”
Drunk driving doesn’t ensure that you’ll get in an accident, but it dramatically increases the risk. This “risk” concept is one you seem to be having trouble with.
“Life experience” is not necessarily equivalent or superior to expert knowledge. It may be, but you’d have to actually make an argument to prove it. In this case, we don’t know anything about the gentleman’s knowledge or experience, except that his actions a) contradict all the recommendations of experts in the field that I could find and b) seem stupid for the reasons that I’ve already explained.
I think that what this guy did was very stupid and put lives at risk unnecessarily. I think that’s a reasonable opinion – one that I’ve backed up both from rational argument and citing expert sources. If you disagree, that’s fine, but I don’t see why anyone should take your opinion seriously given that the entirety of your argument so far consists of:
“well, it turned out fine this time, didn’t it? Therefore it couldn’t possibly have been a bad idea!”
Amateur. Never pull a gun on Wilford Brimley.
I think you might want to think about what those words mean and then think how you just compared a typical flight or fight response with the decision to first drink until drunk and then the decision to drive while drunk.
That’s irrelevant to the logical form of your argument, though. The failure of your logic is in failing to understand the concept of “risk”. it has nothing to do with the motivations of drunk driver or mustache whether it’s fight or flight or anything else.
I’ve already conceded that the situation was emotionally charged and mustache can be somewhat exculpated on those grounds. That is, he did something stupid because he was overcome with emotion. That’s certainly more excusable than doing something stupid in the cold light of reason. But it doesn’t make it any less stupid.
Actually in kenpo class even as a kid, I was taught how to defend myself against people with knives AND guns.
Well your instructor was doing it wrong and put you in danger. 
(total sarcasm)
LOL, me too!
But my sensei made a big deal about the fact that you should only do that if you’re pretty sure the guy is going to attack you no matter what, and that in almost any real situation, you should throw your money on the ground and get away at the first opportunity.
Notice that people who do MMA don’t use kenpo. It’s not a very effective fighting style. Experienced martial artists know better than to fuck with armed muggers.
Yeah, if he didn’t emphasize that those techniques are mostly make-believe and in any real life situation you should do what the mugger says and get away as quickly as possible that’s correct.
Believe it or not, instructors of child karate lessons are not necessarily very effective or knowledgeable when it comes to real life or death situations.
Hey, there are definitely circumstances where giving the mugger your wallet, or whatnot, makes sense. One of my (former) coworkers was shot twice in a robbery gone bad, and he almost died (in fact I think he did, and needed to be brought back). I’m not sure of the specific circumstances (I wasn’t there after all), but something tells me he may not have fully acquiesced to the armed robbers, and things went awry.
But this fellow in the straw hat? Looks like he saw his chance, went for it, and saved the day. I’m certainly not going to hold him negatively responsible for any aspect of this story.
