Have you ever been mugged? Have you ever had your purse snatched?
And that was just this morning. The rest of the day doesn’t look all that good either.
(Actually, I’m only kidding around. Fortunately, this didn’t really happen to me…thus far, anyway.)
While this didn’t actually happen to me, it could have. And chances are it may have happened to several people across the country during the time it took me to type that first paragraph. This kind of thing happens every day in crowded parking lots in broad, open daylight. And that’s the gospel truth, according to the news media.
Criminals are everywhere. They’re part of earth’s renewable natural resources like water, oxygen, dirt, morons, and politicians. The world will never suffer a shortage of morons and criminals. Mainly because they are constantly being recycled through Congress. And while there’s no way we can prevent the government from snatching our purses and robbing us, there are several ways we can protect ourselves from the petty, purse-snatching criminals that roam our neighborhood shopping centers and supermarket parking lots.
According to the experts who teach self-defense, the first lesson we should learn is how to prevent a would-be attacker from marking us as a target.
Remember the TV show “Miami Vice”? Remember how Crockett and Tubbs would crouch down with guns drawn, how they craned their necks around corners, slid along the sides of buildings, and turned around in circles aiming at everything that moved?
Well, that’s not the way to do it. For one thing we would look totally stupid, and for another…well, we’re probably not vice cops. And fortunately for most of us, we’re not in Miami.
Many of us today are walking around without a clue as to where we are or what we’re doing. Our minds are on other things like our jobs or the lack of one, our finances, did we leave the water running in the bathroom when we left home this morning, and where did Little Timmy learn that ugly word?!
We breeze through our routine like an automaton, unaware of any pending danger other than the possibility of fainting from hunger because we didn’t have time to eat all day and it’s after four o’clock. We’re distracted, we’re unaware of someone watching us, and this makes us a perfect candidate for the criminal to attack, rob, kidnap, assault, murder, or even worse…force us to listen to Bluegrass music for several hours.
The experts tell us the number one rule of self-defense is to always be alert and aware of our surroundings. We should walk with our heads held high, observing the actions of other people, looking at faces, and checking out the parked cars.
An attacker is looking for a target that can be caught off guard. The element of surprise is their favorite weapon. Not allowing ourselves to be surprised can be our best defense. Unless, of course, it’s a surprise party, but muggers don’t usually care enough to throw us a party.
How many times do we leave a store and walk to our cars with our heads down, rummaging in our purse for our keys or stuffing a receipt into our pockets? We get into the car without looking around and sit there for several minutes doing everything except locking our doors and starting the engine. Occasionally we may discover that it isn’t even our car we’re sitting in.
Here’s a thought. Maybe we should develop a habit of locking our car doors and starting the engine the moment we get into our cars. Then we can always answer that text message or put on our lipstick while we’re driving.
By staying alert and practicing these few safety measures, we can be assured that we will get out of the parking lot safely and without incident every time. That is, unless we’re shot by some rival gang in a drive-by. But that will be covered in another chapter, titled “Random Acts of Stupidity And How to Avoid Them.”
