What would you do?

Mugger wants valuables, gets shot instead

The mugger in the blue shirt made the worst mistake of his life when he pulled a gun on an off-duty cop. The cop drops the contents of his pockets, bends over, and backs away quickly. While the mugger stoops to pick up the goods, the officer draws his concealed carry pistol and puts multiple shots into the mugger’s chest at close range.

Would you have fought or just given up the jewelry?

Most people would probably agree that the mugger got what he deserved, so instead of quarterbacking this we’d like your opinion on this if you were there as the LEO or maybe just a private citizen licensed with a concealed carry weapon, what would you do?

Video Transcription

Quarterbacking with Active Self Protection
What do we learn here about fighting off a mugger?

1. There’s a well-worn joke that ATM stands for “Accessory To Mugging,” and it’s not far from the truth. The ATM is of course a likely place to be attacked because it is a transitional space. A mugger or armed robber can easily ambush you if your attention is engrossed in the machine or your phone, and they are built to allow for easy access and escape. When you’re at the ATM, be sure to be extra aware of what is going on around you. I even suggest standing with your back to the machine, or at least with your shoulders perpendicular to it so that you can constantly see what is happening around you!

Video Transcription:
[Intro music]

[John Correia] When the balloon goes up, you gotta be ready to do whatever it takes to protect yourself from an armed robber.

Hi everyone, this is John, with today’s Active Self Protection lesson. It comes today from Venazuela, and an awful lot of Active Self-Protection fans have sent me this one. Thanks one and all for that. It teaches us some incredible important lessons here; about situational awareness, particularly in transitional spaces; about valuables and how exposing your valuables can make you a more likely target; shows us the importance of distraction and of a smooth draw; and also the importance of marksmanship and multiple targets, as well as follow-up actions.

As this one starts, we see the armed robber here in the blue shirt walk up here on this guy that we find out is an off-duty officer, because he wants his chains. The guy drops all of his stuff and says ‘hey, here, you want my stuff, great.’ walks around this other person and uses that to get his firearm out and get multiple shots on target, ending the threat and the life of the armed robber. As everybody else goes we see our good guy start taking up follow-up actions, looking around, seeing who else is a threat, seeing what’s going on with his original threat, is he moving, is he going to become a threat again; no, and so this one now thankfully is over.

I wanna back up and learn some significant lessons here. Number one is that he’s in a dangerous spot, an ATM, and now he’s been accosted by an armed robber. And don’t think you can always be aware of everything all the time, especially in busy places, but knowing what’s going on around you is important. Now you’ve got to deal with this guy at close range. I think this was incredibly wise. This guy just dropped his stuff, ‘hey, the armed robber said he wanted my chain and my wallet, great’ drop them on the floor here and give him something else to think about. Don’t just stand there and fight him when he’s strong, but when you are. Next, I think this one is gonna give us a little bit of heartburn for some people, you say ‘well he used this woman as a barricade’, no, he used her as concealment. He went around her to conceal his draw, I think that was really wise, because he got ahead of the badguy. Then we’re gonna see him bring up on target here, and all of his shots are going to be very quick, point-shooting at this kind of a distance, and we’re going to see him get multiple shots off quickly, at very close distance; one, two, three, four; and we see that fourth shot finally got him to go down, and everybody scatters, and now our badguy is done, but look at what our good guy is doing, he’s heads-up on another threat, great, love that. He didn’t get over-focused on his target, he was looking around to see what was going on around him, and now he’s going to go take appropriate follow-up action. So here we learned distraction techniques, we learned having your firearm on you, we learned drawing concealment and from cover if you possibly can, getting shots on target quickly, this guy did a great job of covering his ASP.

Source: Active Self Protection Youtube, John Correia

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