Breaking Down Two Mob Assaults
What the victims did right and wrong in two high profile cases
As I talked about on Monday’s episode mob attacks are on the rise, partly driven in some places by “migrant” gangs as you can see in this video report:
But there were two attacks that have circulated on social media I would like to break down to illustrate some of the concepts we’ve talked about before regarding mob violence and your defense against it. First from The New York Post is a video report concerning a brutal, random attack on a 62 year old man on Staten island.
Here we see that the victim was only saved from further damage (or perhaps death) by the fact he lived in a community where others were willing to jump in. So for what he did right:
As an elderly man he chose his evening walk route through areas where he is well known enough for people to want to help him or he has chosen to live somewhere with a community culture of helping your neighbors.
Until help arrived he tried to maintain distance from the largest part of the group, including using traffic as a last ditch effort to escape them. You sometimes have to take risks to survive.
He is fairly physically fit. Your fitness is important to survival.
As for what he did “wrong” understand that here we’re not blaming the victim for the attack just examining areas of behavior that can be changed to make him safer.
He apparently saw the group and continued on as usual. Reports are the group was unruly and aggressive before the attack. While we don’t know for sure if he noticed them my advice is to not let political correctness keep you from taking immediate action to leave any environment that has large groups of unruly males in it.
He was unarmed. This was not his fault but the fault of the NYC voters who helped stripped his rights but that’s another issue. I would recommend at least carrying a cane in NYC to the elderly.
Otherwise there was little else he could have done due to NYC laws and culture which makes civilians helpless against mobs. While I personally prefer NYers stay in their city and not move around wrecking up the rest of the country he should think about moving.
The second clip is of a man pulling a gun on a crowd of kids - who were assaulting him. Video has two different vantage points and the first is unclear what is happening:
So what did he do right?
He was armed.
He understood that being hit by several people in a mob was life threatening.
He knew brandishing works. He didn’t have to kill anyone.
What could have been better:
He absorbed several punches before grabbing his gun. If he was dazed or injured by any it would have been over for him.
He allowed the crowd to surround him. I would have moved into the store and locked up rather than be out there.
He engaged the mob. Mobs aren’t people anymore - there is no point in trying to talk them down. Immediately seek a defensible space and don’t bother talking to them.
We’ve gone over some of these concepts before in a more theoretical context but I wanted to have real world examples for you to think about.