Situational Awareness [no gun involved]

Alright so today I got my own personal dose of verification of the need for situational awareness. On the upside I'm still on Reddit and didn't suffer any loss. Again on the upside I got out before shit got bad. On the downside I'd say I definitely let things get much further than they should have gone.

I live on campus at Wayne State which is in Detroit. It's located in Midtown which is usually very safe if you carry yourself properly. So I'm in my car in broad daylight at 4pm. People are around but population isn't dense. I'm parked but engine running and I'm on the phone. I see this guy looking shifty as in he's looking around and eventually I noticed at one point was inspecting my passenger window a bit too closely. I should have pulled away then but doors were locked so I'm like ah whatever. Anyway he backs off and keeps looking around.

So then after a bit more he walks around and approaches my driver window. Yeah at that point being on a college campus I realized I had options of pull out my knife and put it on the dash [point being if it's a panhandler he'll back off] or drive off. Now I was close enough I ran the risk of hitting the guy by pulling out but decided it was acceptable. Shift it into drive and get the hell out of there.

Now a few things stuck out...

1.) It was 4pm. Middle of the afternoon.

2.) It was a main street in front of open businesses.

3.) Fear did get involved. I cannot carry on a college campus so all I had that would pass for a weapon would be my leatherman multi-tool. Given option of knife or run I decided run. If I'd had a gun I would've pulled it out of fear.

3a.) I didn't NEED to pull a gun in retrospect.

3b.) Because of making a poor assessment early on I put myself into a situation where I would've ended up pulling a gun out of fear. Reality is that situation never needed to occur. It occurred because I let it occur by complacency.

4.) Tim Horton's has a bitchin French Vanilla coffee and it was completely worth it.

Why did I post this essay?

It demonstrates two things of importance to me. To the anti-gunners it demonstrates that situations can occur anywhere that put people in danger. Crime happens on a main street in broad daylight just like it does at 2am in a dark alley. To those that do carry I hope you take this as a nice reminder to always be vigilant. Making proper assessments early on can prevent a future need to defend yourself. I hope that when I do eventually move on to carrying I can make the proper assessments so I don't end up back where I was earlier today.