Exactly what I was thinking. Even if you cannot physically retreat, you can verbally de-escalate the situation by (gulp), apologizing, even if they were wrong and you were right. Massad Ayoob (or Mossad Ayoob?) gave this advice in one of his columns that he wrote for an ancient issue of some gun mag once (I forget which one). Better to lose a bit of "pride" than lose $100k in legal fees and a year of your life proving that you're innocent in a questionable (to some) shoot. Being armed is a big responsibility and shouldn't be taken lightly.jamisjockey wrote:I'm not big, strong or agile. I have a documented bad back.
The real issue is, why are you in the fight to begin with?
One time, in Austin, I was in an elevator and some crazy drunk guy glared at me and said, "What're you looking at?" (his scantily clad girlfriend was with him). "Nothing," I replied. Bam! He punches the elevator inches next to my head to intimidate me. "I'm sorry," I said. "That's what I thought," he replied. The entire time, my finger was on the trigger of my gun in my coat pocket and pointed at his COM (I had not learned to put my finger on the frame for safety yet at the time). He's just lucky that I expected him to punch the elevator to intimidate me. Otherwise, if it startled me, I might've pulled the trigger as a startled response.
Where do these idiots come from? I would never even dream of bullying some random stranger on the street in Texas, especially if the stranger had some strange object in his pocket pointed at my COM! It's surprising exactly how shallow the shallow end of the gene pool really is....