I was gasping for breath. Trying to reach the phone
to call 911. Alone.
Well, not quite alone. That was the problem.
I was on the back deck about 20 minutes into a yoga set. I was somewhere
after warrior II blissfully heading toward relaxation pose. Off the deck was a
perfect yoga atmosphere; a bucolic vista with deer grazing, turkeys doing what they do in the spring, frogs sounding off in
the pond and a purple martin checking out the martin house.
I was on my back just finishing a bridge pose when the lab puppy had
had enough. She had been spayed a week earlier and was restless after a week of
forced inactivity. Restless and full of attitude. Downright pissed off might be
a better description, actually. I was too tempting of a target so without
warning she hurled her 90 pounds onto my chest and throat. Kind of like a
fuzzy, wiggling bag of concrete mix landing on me.
I gasped. Searched in vain for the phone to call for help.
OK, I didn't really need to call 911, but that makes a nice lead-in to
the blog.
Ann Arbor Arms’ tagline is, “Defense... Now It’s Personal”. Still, some
ask, “why worry about self defense when we all pay taxes for police”?
Simple. As I am fond of saying, “when seconds count, the police are
only minutes away.” In many rural settings especially, a call to the police
might not yield their presence for quite a while. Even in my township, which
has a great response time record, there were times when responses were long.
I remember a panicked homeowner
calling because she thought someone was breaking in to her basement. The woman
was home alone with the children and had neither a plan nor the means to defend
herself and her children. They were in a far corner of the township and it was
a miserably foggy night. Emergency response was a white-knuckled, adrenalin
producing 10 miles an hour. Response time was over 10 minutes for me, and even
longer for the second car. Fortunately nobody was breaking in. It was what we
call a W.H.A. call. (Yes, I see your hand raised in the back with a question,
but I’m not gonna tell you what that stands for. Work on it, you have all the
clues you need.)
Face it, there can’t be a cop standing by on every corner in case we
need help. In truth, would we really want to live in a police state where cops
are so numerous that they are always just seconds away? I wouldn't, and I was
one of them.
So, defense is personal. Wait.
I’ll go farther. Defense is a personal responsibility. Citizens need to make a decision to either be victims or not be victims. If you choose to not prepare yourself I wish you
well. But please reconsider and don't plan on relying on the cops with the ever-shrinking budgets and cutbacks.
If you have made the decision to stand on your own, we at A3 can help.
We offer tools and training for self-defense and we are not just talking about
firearms.
Cop training deals with what we call a “Force Continuum”. It is a
response guide that escalates responses based on the bad guy’s actions.
Example; in most cases, an unarmed threat from a crook usually would
result in an unarmed or at most a pepper spray or taser response, but not
deadly force. A crook with a weapon on the other hand, could, and probably
should, be met with much greater force.
A3 stocks items for civilian use that cover the continuum. We have
defensive key chains, pepper spray, more pepper spray, defensive pens, and, of course, guns. Also
look for our expanding classes where we teach tactics to avoid becoming a
victim as well as what to do when confronted with an attacker.
Stay Safe
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