Some Advice When Leaving A Coin Show

I always make a run of right hand turns watch for followers. Get gassed up the day before carry some drink and food so I don't have to stop anywhere. Also keep a loaded .45acp 1911 with me. Last resort of course. Can't be too careful these days.

Remove your show badge or ID before you exit the show. Don't carry cases of coins from the car to the show or vice versa without two people at all times watching out.

None taken, but if you have that ability why not? If youre making purchases at a coin show thats as good of a place as any to have it if you can.

Obviously some shows are more of a threat than others by their location and size ect, but it never hurts to be aware just in case.

True, the problem is street crime, ATM crime and other crime is pretty prevalent. This means coin show crime is pretty prevalent too. Take steps to not become one of the victims.

Better to have it and not need it then need it and not have it.




Not really. You can not be scared of something but be a realist and realize it can happen.

I can see how it would seem weird to people that havent been around guns like Europeans. Its not like we walk around corners pulling them out and constantly grabbing them ect.

Its just something thats there if you need it and other wise no one knows its there and you pay little to no attention to it. Kind of like the fire extinguisher under the sink. You dont think youll ever have to use it, you arent constantly pulling it out, and you hope it wont ever be needed, but if you do need it youll sure be glad it was there

For some decades I have been involved with training people for working in Peace keeping missions. Most recently I have worked with Austrian police training people for dealing with field issues in some of the most dangerous places in the world. So with that background you will forgive me for stating that the comment quoted next is very naive:




The first point: You never want to get into a robbery situation in the first place. A openly carried weapon is useful for this for the simple reason you are then perceived as a hard target. Impulse crims will more often than not avoid hard targets and go and hunt out a softer easier target. A concealed weapon is useless for this purpose.

Second point. Assuming you are carrying a concealed weapon and are robbed. Will you actually have the ability ( time, reaction speed, and the ability to process the situation accurately enough) to respond correctly and safely and actually use the weapon? In real life the most common answer is no!
Once you are in a robbery situation your whole aim ( often this is purely instinctive) is to survive and material possessions are unimportant. Armed robberies occur very quickly and are 90% of the time completely unexpected. There is a huge psychological shock ( equivalent to the shock of capture) the fight or flight response triggers huge changes in blood flow particularly in the brain. These changes enable you to run or fight but (excepting a very few rare individuals) your cognitive processing ability is diminished. IMHO this reduction in cognitive processing ability is one of the factors that sees many people shot with their own weapons in a robbery situation.
3. In a robbery situation the crims are also highly stressed and have little Cognitive ability ( yes they probably didn't have much to begin with). In the majority of situations all they want is to get the goods and "get out of there" as quickly as possible. They do have an advantage in that they initiate the situation and if weapons are involved their weapons will be already drawn. It only takes a victim to make a single unpredicted move to initiate a tiny finger movement that send a bullet down the barrel. It is usually very unlikely the victim has the time to access and operate a concealed weapon.


I could go on with more points like this. I have seen highly trained military personal unable to respond in a Robbery/Attack situation. I recall one incident where an experienced soldier was assaulted in a bar during a peace keeping mission. The situation got out of hand. The soldier had no weapon(was on leave) but one of his attackers did.....the soldier only wanted to escape but the attacker was determined. When the attacker drew his side arm the soldiers fight or flight response cut in.....his hearing shut down,he experienced tunnel vision and all he could do was decide he needed to get the weapon.....which he did. They were in a grapple at the time. The assailant having lost his weapon still continued fighting and refused to let the soldier go......the soldier even though he now had a firearm didn't think to use it and still just focused on getting away. So he just hit the assailant with the side arm until he was released and he then escaped.

The point of the story despite solid firearms arms training and many years experience in this situation no thought was given to using the side arm by the victim. This is no means an aberration and is highly typical behavior in such situations.

If you are going to use a sidearm for defense... you need to have intensive repeated training that is situationally appropriate. This training has to be the point all your responses are automatic( under the systems approach training levels: I am referring to level four training) and when the fight or flight response is triggered the training can then take over. I doubt that many carrying side arms have had that level of training.

Simply going to the shooting range every week is not enough!!

I still think it is Naive because people saying things believe they can actually react correctly during an Armed Robbery

I think I see some very different assumptions to mine in that last response of baseball 21



I and my colleagues teach, based on our experiences, people, to have a survival chance not a fighting chance.

What I see in many similar comments is that people are reacting to the loss of power and what to take back the power by use of a fire arm. In other words they are not going to do this to me!




And we can add stats from Vietnam and later conflicts that point out in a good unit/Platoon 15% of the soldiers fire for effect the rest point in the general direction and "spray".
Now these are people trained to handle weapons but in real conflict they can't function as trained. Can any one say for sure that in a robbery they would be able to use a side arm effectively?

I am already of the opinion, based on experience, that it is only a very small minority who could. I would add it is impossible to predict who can handle themselves well in such a situation.

My back ground comes from dealing with NGO, aid workers military and police who operate nasty areas of Africa, Middle east, And eastern Europe(Kosovo) I have carried weapons ( rifle). Invariably I find those who have experience of violent robberies survive through correct behavior not through use of side arms. The general over arching principle is well over 90% of robberies involve perpetrators who have no interest in causing bodily harm. Of the remainder where the perpetrators want to kill the victim usually has very little opportunity to Fight.

The key is to take actions that minimize the chance of injury and death. I also believe it is a very special and rare person who can successfully use a side arm to protect themselves during a Robbery. ( saving some one else being robbed is very differnt!

Burglary is very different to armed robbery. I can see a side arm being much more useful in those situations. I do wonder about Mr Bidens view on Shotguns.......( unless sawn off) I can see a shotgun, or rifle within a house as not so useful because of the length of the barrel. With a pistol you can cover a much wider area within an enclosed space quickly.


If we go back to the start of this thread It is behaviors that prevent the situation from ever occurring that are the best. ie: not using the same routine/travel routes. Keeping an eye out on the environment for behavior and things that are out of place.

I am not anti Guns but I don't see them as important to personal safety as others do.

It is impossible to know, but that doesn't mean that no one should be prepared because they may freeze up.

The areas you mentioned I dont really find comparable to the US for the most part. As a criminologists I dont believe in comparing vastly different countries to each other since they all have different crime problems, and their criminals operate differently. A common street criminal in the US isn't going to operate the same way as say a gang running a kidnap for ransom business.


That said for the US even the most conservative (as in lowest not republican) anti-gun criminologists in america estimate that 100k people a year defend themselves from crime with a gun as the low end of their estimates. Other estimates go as high as a couple million. Considering theyres only 12k gun murders a year (most of which is gang violence) when you look at the two numbers its clear that in the US at least, far more people successfully defend themselves with guns then get harmed from it. You can see that just from the lowest number of defenses and taking the murder account as a whole. When you weed out the murders that clearly werent caused by that the numbers skew more towards people defending themselves as opposed to being killed because of it.

Thats not to say that everyone can or every situation you can get out of, but those 100k+ people a year would disagree that they should have just went along with it and hoped they survived.





It all depends on what type it is, what the robber has, and really its impossible to generalize with all the different factors. For the case in question leaving a coin show its more likely youd be followed home them have someone stick a gun in your face right outside the show in front of everyone. If you were followed and see the car behind you youd have it ready when they got to the car if they approach you at home (and yes if your being followed go to a police station instead of home).

If they get the jump on you theres nothing you can really do about it but no one, or at least I never have, argues that it will defend you from everything. Being smart and not being put in that situation is certainly the best deterrent.




Im not anti house shotgun if you dont have a stock on it (not exactly the most user friendly for women and people on the smaller side) but his advise was terrible. A double barrel shotgun really? A least a pump action is intimidating when you rack it. Then to say I would tell my wife to go fire off two shots with it off the balcony what world does he live in. Aside from the fact thats completely illegal and dangerous unless you live in the middle of no where, why on earth would you tell her to empty something that doesn't reload that quickly and basically turn the gun into an over priced baseball bat.




They arent the end all be all or even the first line of defense. Theyre the last line of defense or that hail mary when you have no better options. You never really know what will happen and most of the time nothing will, but if something ever did happen Id rather have it then be thinking I wish it wasnt sitting at home

Criminal theory works off the basis that for a crime to happen three things need to converge. A willing offender, a suitable victim and the lack of a capable guardian. If you remove any 1 of those three the overwhelming majority of crimes are stopped especially if its the first two. The police arent going to be everywhere and cant be. When they arent there the only possible guardians are yourself and whose around. The gun can give you the ability to be your own guardian. Again its not perfect and it will fail some of the time, but I've yet to see the evidence that without extensive military or Leo training that its likely to do more harm than good