I feel like I’ve been in multiple shitty situations where I was saved by being dumb or weird and the would-be attacker being either confused or amused enough to let me be.

Not the most exciting, but I once answered a skeezy call at 2:00am. It was a holiday, so I was one of maybe 6 people in the dormitory. It was very much a horror story setup. The caller said something unpleasant and it was 2:00am so I didn’t really get what he said. “I’m sorry, could you call back tomorrow? Be happy to talk about it then, but right now I’m super tired.”

Probably wouldn’t have even remembered it if the young woman across the hall hadn’t gotten a call the same night. She told me about it the next day. He somehow managed to briefly convince her that he was her highschool boyfriend. They talked for a few minutes before she realized it wasn’t him.

As for me? Dirty bastard never called me back.

(Probably necessary context: College, early nineties, there was a campus phone book that literally gave your name, dorm, room, and phone extension. Finding a woman alone during the holiday was as easy as looking at rooms with lights on and checking the book.)

Good point. This is probably in Japan.

We have so many 7-11s in my area; do other states not have them‽ I’ve traveled quite a bit but it’s honestly not something I kept a tally of

Lol at I’ve never SEEN one…but I have BEEN in one.

I’ve been robbed at knife point, but that was on me. Not going to tell that story!

You can’t just say stuff like that and refuse to elaborate!

I saw someone pointing a gun at someone else in Hollywood in the late 90s. Didn’t stick around to find out what was going on, but there was no gunshot, so I assume it didn’t end too badly.

A few years back, I was carrying groceries back to my car when a guy approached me pointing at me with something obscured by his jacket pocket and said he had a gun and wanted me to take him somewhere. I paused and decided that even though he probably didn’t have one I wasn’t willing to risk it, and besides, I had time to give him a lift. Once he was in the car he said he didn’t have a gun and thought I was just going to tell him to fuck off. I said I wasn’t a risk taker. He talked about being on the run from the police and started talking about how he was in his 30s and needed to stop doing things like this. I never saw any police, so he might have just been paranoid, but who knows. He had me drop him off behind a building not too far away. A strange experience - he should have tried asking nicely instead.

I live in a more southern area and I’ve seen so many people with guns

But then wouldn’t it be a biscuit or something instead of a cookie

Knife murders are also higher stateside: there were 4.96 homicides “due to knives or cutting instruments” in the US for every million of population in 2016.

In Britain there were 3.26 homicides involving a sharp instrument per million people in the year from April 2016 to March 2017.

Euronews

Nah, guns are expensive, knives are useful outside of stabbing people. I’d absolutely expect a knife for a simple holdup here.

Yup, I’m kinda old and never seen anything like this. The closest I’ve seen is a dude open carrying a gun shopping at a grocery store just talking with his wife.

Nothing ever happens to the average person…

Closest was my dad getting pickpocketed in Rome. He loves to travel and only had that one negative experience.

Nobody in my family has had anything like this happen in the US. Sometimes in Brazil or something, but that’s it.