This is the first of four articles on the four rules for maximizing your chances of surviving a violent encounter. There are no strategies that will work every time and you are ultimately responsible for your actions, but these rules will increase your odds dramatically. The single most important thing you can do now and the one thing that can be done in a very short period of time is to prepare yourself mentally. Once you have decided that you will not be a victim and you are going to apply these rules to a violent encounter, you cease to be an easy target for a criminal.

Rule # 1

React immediately.

It sounds simple and it is, but it is not necessarily easy. As you will learn in this series of articles, things will only get worse during the violent encounter. Those first few seconds are as good as it is going to get, so that is the time to do something.

The ideal situation is to avoid the altercation in the first place. This takes listening to your instincts. If you get that strange feeling that something is wrong, you’re probably right. If you see someone acting suspicious, don’t wait to confirm your suspicions until it’s too late. In both of these cases, get out of there! It’s a lot better to listen to your intuition and embarrass yourself than to ignore it and die.

Suppose you’ve made a mistake and you are now confronted by a criminal. If it’s a robbery, the robber will let you know what he wants right away. Whether you choose to give him what he wants or not, you want to do it quickly and then leave the scene. You want to remember one important fact. Even if you are compliant with the robber, 10 percent of the robbers will kill you anyway. They don’t like to leave witnesses. The prudent thing to do is get on the move while he is still thinking in terms of getting the items he wants from you.

People are usually concerned with the scenario where the assailant has a gun. After all, you can’t outrun a bullet. That is true. If you have been in our adult class for any length of time, you have learned defenses against a handgun which are very effective. You do have to realize that they only work when the gunman is very close to you. If he is several feet away, your best bet is to run away. If you have given him your property and started to run away, he isn’t going to shoot you unless he’s already decided to shoot you. Why would he? He’s gotten what he wanted. If he’s already decided to shoot you, you’re better off giving him a moving target and creating some distance. Some statistics indicate that criminals hit their targets about 4 percent of the time. Can you imagine how much lower that number would be if the targets were always moving? The truth is that no one is particularly accurate in the life-or-death encounters that you are likely to face. The adrenaline rush causes fine motor skills to deteriorate rapidly. There is a famous NYPD case where 4 officers fired 41 times at close range into a vestibule of a building at a man who was basically stationary, hitting him only 19 times. 11 of these hits were to the lower extremities. Because of the nature of the building, some of these hits may have been ricochet hits. 3 of the 4 officers had been involved in previous shootings, so these were combat-tested veterans. Hitting a moving target under these conditions is virtually impossible. Remember rule number 1 – React immediately.