What were your close calls

[RPBrown]

After reading some of the posts, there are some that have had things happen close to them, or close to an area that they frequent. What are some of those "close calls"?

For me, there are a few.
1) I was robbed at gunpoint on a jobsite. This was before CHL was around. (1976)
2) There was an attempted robbery on me by a pan handler with a toy gun. Again, before CHL. (1989)
3) I lived maybe 300 yards from the Oshmans store where Aubty Hawkins was killed by the "Texas 7". I had my CHL, was armed, and went by the store on the way home from parents house.
4) My wife and daughter own a dog groom shop that was next to a conenience store that was robbed several times. They both carry and are always armed.

There have been a few times my "spidey senses" have been aroused and a few robberies in areas or stores that we occasionally go to but were not at when it happened.

[oohrah]

This was before CHL. I was in a sports bar sitting near the entrance. A guy had been thrown out for raising a ruckus at the pool tables. He came back with a pistol, shouted something, and fired two shots down the center of the place, then took off. I looked up when I heard the shout, saw the pistol, and then was on the floor. He was gone before anyone could react. Fortunately, no one was injured. There was an off-duty LEO who supposedly chased him down.

I've thought about that event many times and what I would do if I had been carrying.

[PBratton]

After reading some of the posts, there are some that have had things happen close to them, or close to an area that they frequent. What are some of those "close calls"?

For me, there are a few.
1) I was robbed at gunpoint on a jobsite. This was before CHL was around. (1976)
2) There was an attempted robbery on me by a pan handler with a toy gun. Again, before CHL. (1989)
3) I lived maybe 300 yards from the Oshmans store where Aubty Hawkins was killed by the "Texas 7". I had my CHL, was armed, and went by the store on the way home from parents house.
4) My wife and daughter own a dog groom shop that was next to a conenience store that was robbed several times. They both carry and are always armed.

There have been a few times my "spidey senses" have been aroused and a few robberies in areas or stores that we occasionally go to but were not at when it happened.

I knew and worked with Officer Hawkins, l think about him every Christmas. I am still a bit angry with the TDC over the whole thing....

[Beiruty]

Many things that I took in self defense and defense of my loved ones are sometime too hard to restate. I posted before on one incident in 1980s when I was involved in firefight while I was unarmed. I was able to defend myself and others with some moderate injuries on my head. The aggressor was forced to flee the scene and was never seen again.

[jimlongley]

Left my ship early, 1970 in Brooklyn, to make sure I would be on time to catch the train to go home and spend my "weekend" home with my new bride. I had a few extra minutes, so I decided to stop in at a bar on Flushing Ave near the Navy Base and reserve center and have a quick beer with the guys off my ship.

The layout of the bar was the old fashioned kind, Ladies' entrance and dining room in the back, corner door in front, which opened next to a cigarette machine or jukebox with just room enough for one person to stand there between it and the door. I opened the door, nodded to the guy standing there, and started to walk toward the bar.

As I crossed the short distance from the door to the bar I saw a shape moving in the door between the bar and the dining room, and then realized there was a guy standing there pointing a .45 at me. I hit the deck and he shot the guy standing next to the door. One shot, Center of Mass, the victim was dead before he hit the floor. I stuck around long enough to see the shooter just drop his gun hand down to his side and then collapse in a chair in tears and to confirm that the shootee was indeed dead. and then I departed for Grand Central Terminal because I did not want to get trapped there being a witness and all.

The shooter's wife had been "messing around" with the shootee while the shooter was away on a cruise and had asked for a divorce when he returned, so he broke into an armory and stole a 1911 and one magazine and a couple of rounds of ammo and went immediately to the bar where they had all hung out, where he entered by the back door and just walked up and shot the guy.

The split between my hitting the deck and the shot was almost instantaneous. and I think he was already pulling the trigger when I walked into the line of fire. I also think he was so focused that he may not have noticed me.

[The Annoyed Man]

All of mine were when I was much younger, and I was living in states where guns and gunplay were generally frowned on, even for the law-abiding. I don't know if these counted as "close calls" back then, as they all ended well for me, but now that I'm old and gimpy and carry a gun, they might well have ended differently today—and today I would call them "close calls."

1. California, Pasadena, I'm about 21 years old or so, and I'm very involved in martial arts. My ex-wife (to whom I was still married at the time) and I are managing a small apartment building. A tenant's drunk friend creates a disturbance out in the courtyard and I calmly confront the guy and tell him he has to either cool it or leave, or I'll call the police. A few minutes later, he accosts me in the parking lot, and he comes up with a "noife" in his right hand. The thing is that I wasn't even thinking in terms of closing distance or anything like that, and he was already pretty close to me. I didn't even think about my reaction. The instant I saw the knife, I threw an outward-crescent kick with my left leg to his right wrist and knocked the knife out of his grasp, where it landed about 4-5 feet away. That was the end of it, and he discovered urgent business elsewhere and left in a hurry before he got his butt wooped or I could call the cops. I picked up his knife and gave it to his friend. A week or two later, the same guy came by the apartment building and apologized profusely to me, and wanted to know where I had learned "all that fancy Kung Fu [stuff]." It wasn't Kung Fu; it was Chitoryu Karate. It didn't even occur to me until later that I had devolved to my training. I hadn't thought it trough or anything. I just reacted the way I was taught.

2. New York City, it's the summer of 1976 and I'm 23-24 years old. I was crossing Central Park South from the Plaza Hotel side to the park side, and some guy in a car blows through the crosswalk (I have the walk sign) at mach schnell, forcing me to jump out of his way. As he goes by my back, I swing downward like a hammer blow and pound on his right rear window with my right fist....probably not a good idea, but his crazy move had me ticked off.....and then I finish crossing the street and make a left on the sidewalk, heading west along the park. My situation awareness is not good at the time, and I fail to notice that he has pulled over and waited for me to walk on by. The next thing I know, I am violently shoved into the rock wall that encloses the park, and I bounce off it. As I came off the wall, I kind of dropped my center of gravity a little bit and spun to my left, and this REALLY big guy is bearing down on me and close. Again, I never really thought it through, I just reacted as I had trained and I whipped out my left hand popped him hard across the bridge of his nose with a backhand. He grabbed his nose, which started bleeding pretty good, I backed out of it and circled to my right away from the wall, and that was pretty much the end of it. He cussed me for hitting his back window, and I told him he had no right to complain for trying to run down a legal pedestrian, and asked him if he wanted me to call a cop to sort things out. He didn't want to. I walked away backwards, facing him, until it was safe to turn around, and I left. He drove off and called me a multisyllabic oedipal reference as he went by, and I smiled and waved. That was all she wrote.

3. Still NYC, and I'm at work down near SoHo and I'm 24. A fellow employee and I are having lunch together and his supervisor, who is a much older man with some anger management issues, comes and starts berating him for taking his lunch break...to which he was entitled....and using a lot of racist language in his rant (my coworker is a black guy). I tell the old guy, "man, why don't you just back off and let him finish his lunch?" The old guy starts raving and gets purple-faced and produces a packing knife. I pop to my feet and start to back away from him. He moves in and I repeat #1 with a left outward-crescent kick to his right wrist and knock the knife out of his grasp.....the 2nd and only other time in my left I've ever done that move in a for-realz situation. The other employee and I flee the lunchroom, and I go straight to the general manager's office and report the incident. It goes my way, and they fire the old guy. Too bad in a way...he was a loooong time employee, but he had been getting more and more erratic apparently, and I guess my comment was the last straw that popped all of his gaskets. But he was lucky it was me. I had a brown belt at the time. My coworker was a more advanced martial artist than I was and could have easily taken him apart and left him in a heap if it had gone really sideways.

4. STILL in NYC, I'm 25 years old, and I'm walking back from the market to my apartment, with a bag of groceries in each arm. It was just random bad luck, and I crossed paths with a gang of young toughs who were starting to try and claim my neighborhood (200 block of E. 83rd St) as part of their territory. These kids were actually all a lot younger than me...mid teens maybe....but there were a LOT of them, and numbers made them really brave. I don't know why they picked on me...they just did. They were hanging around the front stoop of a building I had to walk past, and as I was walking by, one of them stepped forward and hoyked a big loogie right across my face. I nearly walked into it. I shot him a dirty look and they were instantly surrounding me. It was one of those deals where I had to drop my groceries to defend myself. They'd do things like one of them would rush in at me from behind, and if I pivoted to confront that one, another one would do the same thing. They started doing things like throwing trash cans at me. The whole time they are verbally heckling me and spitting at me and stuff like that. Then the same one that had started it all—he must have been their leader—grabs an empty 40 oz beer bottle from the trash they've strewn about, breaks it on the stoop next to him, and menaces me with it. I remember then that it got real quiet and time started to slow down. I don't know if it was auditory exclusion or not, or maybe his cohorts just quit heckling when they saw it take a turn for the really serious. I dropped into a stance and faced him (I fight left side out), and got ready for whatever was going to happen next. Just then, a cop I knew who was walking his beat came around the corner and unwittingly broke things up. The kid with the bottle threw it at me, and they all ran off. A week or so later, these same kids swarmed a cop a few blocks away, beat him up pretty badly, and stole his gun. Then a couple of weeks after that, they all vanished and I never saw any of them again.

That's pretty much it. I've had a pretty boring life since then, and that's OK with me.

[G26ster]

I'm lucky I guess. I'm 71, and except for back in '69 & '70 when a couple hundred thousand folks fired everything conceivable in my face trying to kill me, nothing has happened

[RPBrown]

TAM, as we all know the moral to your stories is dont go to NY or Cali.

[The Annoyed Man]

TAM, as we all know the moral to your stories is dont go to NY or Cali.

I don't know..... there might be a couple of other morals in there......"don't stay young and stupid any longer than you have to" might be one of them.

One of my favorite phrases is "Is this the hill I want to die on?" The answer more often than not these days is "no, it isn't," and that determines my next action. Let me revisit those scrapes of mine in the light of the wisdom of years:

1. I call the cops and let them deal with it. If I had never confronted the guy in the courtyard.....even though I was calm about it.....he would have never tried to jump me with a knife in the parking lot later.

2. I don't smack the guy's back window. I keep walking, glad that he didn't collect me as a grill ornament. If I hadn't have done what I did, he'd have never pulled over and assaulted me, I would not have broken his nose, and he would have never made the comment about the nature of my relationship with my mother.

3. I don't back-talk the old guy. Instead, I simply report him to the general manager and let him deal with it. If I'd have kept my mouth shut, it might not have stopped him from ranting at my friend, but it would have kept me out of it and I would not have become the object of his anger. He still made all the ugly racist comments and would have been in a lot of trouble for his behavior, but I wouldn't have had to kick a knife out of his hand.

4. I have better situational awareness, and as soon as I see the gang, I do a 180 and walk the other way. I could have gone the long way around the block to get to my apartment in less time than it took me to stand there and absorb all that abuse before that cop showed up. It would have avoided me shooting the guy a dirty look when his loogie went flying past my face. Everything degenerated from there.

I'm not saying these incidents were entirely my fault, but it was either my own pride and/or lack of situational awareness that put me into those situations.....and THAT is the lesson, at least for me, as much as anything else. The first guy wasn't a horrible person. He was just drunk. Being drunk in public doesn't exactly make you material for public approbation, but hey, I've been drunk in public before....I just wasn't inclined to be a violent drunk. I could have let the pros handle it instead of involving myself. I wasn't rude to him at all, but by involving myself, I made myself his later target. The fact that he was later very apologetic afterward shows me that he understood he was out of control and inappropriate, and he tried to make peace with me.

The second guy was driving like a homicidal maniac, and had I not jumped out of his way, he would have stuck me full on with his car going about 30 mph. I might well have been killed. My angry response was understandable, but it escalated the situation. The fact that he maliciously set up an assault-from-behind against me shows that he was a bad, angry man. But I seriously doubt that my bloodying his nose actually taught him anything more than "don't mess with TAM while he's still young and full of vim and vigor." A guy like that probably goes home and beats his wife every night. He was driving like a crazy man. I don't think he was deliberately targeting me with his car. I just think he didn't care if he hit anybody who happened to be too slow to get out of his way. Forum rules prevent me from using the word to describe him, but let's just say that everybody's got one, and the world is full of them. People like that are a fact of life.....particularly in New York City....and my own reaction of anger was also inappropriate.....not the emotion itself, but my response to the emotion.

The third guy was just an old man with really bad blood pressure problems, a lot of other problems in life, and a lot of anger. My words to him escalated the problem. He is still responsible for his reaction to me, but if there is one thing that 12 step recovery has taught me is that I have a part too in nearly everything that happens to me. Very rarely are we ever 100% victims. I'm not trying to place blame on victims, because pure victimhood does exist, but that doesn't describe me on that day. I chose to use the words that pushed him over the edge, and even though they weren't profane or anything, they were confrontational. It wasn't really my place to confront him. I just got mad at the way he was behaving, bothering the peace of my lunch break, and my anger made me speak the words I used and it make me take the tone of voice I took. Blame is about 80%-90% his and 10%-20% mine. My coworker was smart enough, and fully capable enough, to defend himself, and he kept quiet and didn't say a thing. It didn't need me in the mix.

With the gang, I didn't really do anything wrong, but I was oblivious to my surroundings. I was just walking along with my two grocery bags, not a care in the world, and I wasn't really paying attention to what was out in front of me. I have to say that I went from walking blindly into the trap and then being suddenly aware that I was in danger for my life in a matter of about one second....but by then it was too late. I was already in trouble and would not have gotten out of it without at least a severe beating if that cop had not wandered around the same corner I had just come around a few minutes before. And by the way, in typical New Yorker style, the whole time this was going on, people walking by just across the narrow street watched what was happening but just kept on walking. Nobody tried to help me. Neighbors 2 or 3 doors down just stood and stared as it was happening, but nobody ran inside to call the cops, or tried to step up and come to my assistance. They were simply the gazelles who survived, watching the hyenas kill the gazelle that got caught. I don't know that I would have done anything different except to be more aware of my surroundings at all times and try to avoid getting into the situation.

I'm not really the bad guy in any of these situations, but ALL of them were avoidable and in two of them I was confrontational with the other guy because, in my pride, I thought it was my place to be confrontational. The difference between young and cocky and sure and being much older, trying harder to be humble, and less sure of my own abilities is that the latter state incorporates a sense of my own mortality, and the former state is one of false invincibility. That difference is called wisdom or discernment, and it usually (unfortunately) comes with age and it is wasted on the young.

These are all actually all four relatively minor incidents, but they are the ones that stick in my mind. Like I said in my first post, I don't know if these qualify as "close calls" or not; but I shared them here because they might be instructive to somebody. Critical self-examination means that we unflinchingly accept our part in things, forgive ourselves for our shortcomings, and endeavor to do better going forward.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I'm lucky I guess. I'm 71, and except for back in '69 & '70 when a couple hundred thousand folks fired everything conceivable in my face trying to kill me, nothing has happened

And thank you for that. I was less so inclined back then.....a flaw of my character at the time.

[RogueUSMC]

...but if there is one thing that 12 step recovery has taught me is that I have a part too in nearly everything that happens to me.

If more folks had this in the brain buckets, society as a whole would be much better off...

[SQLGeek]

The only really hair raising things I've experienced to date have been road rage related and I managed to successfully deescalate them. There was one while driving down 99 south of Katy that the aggressor wanted to turn ugly and I had to do a bit of last minute maneuvering with the vehicle to lose the guy.

But I acknowledge there is always a chance that something can happen and I'd prefer to be equipped to defend myself and family as necessary.

[Dadtodabone]

While stopped for gas just outside Mobile, during early evening, a young man tapped on the passengers window of my SUV with what looked to be a chrome Seecamp .32 . My wife, in the passengers seat, abruptly said "Gun!", hit the seat back release, fully reclining her seat, I dropped the gas nozzle I had just picked up, drew my pistol and stepped forward to the drivers window, which I always roll down when fueling so as not to miss any scintillating conversation with my wife, and brought my pistol up and presented through the window. The young man dropped his butane lighter and ran away.
This was a busy well lit station just off I-65 in Saraland, my action, dropping the nozzle and drawing my pistol, attracted more notice than the young man's sidle up to my vehicle. The police were called and the young man was identified through a review of the stations video tape of the pump area. The young man had a prior history and was soon located and arrested. He apparently had preyed upon "older folks" in the past in this manner.
Rather than push on to Greenville, where we had reservations, we stayed at the Microtel across the street and wound up having a TV crew knocking on the door to get our reaction. My wife stated through the door that they should leave or "you'll get a similar reaction from my husband now!" they also departed posthaste.