Opportunism and Criminals

Greg Ellifritz at Active Response Training has a few new posts up that you should check out. His most recent is on the subject of "Knife Attacks: Dealing with the Charging Attacker." His recommendation, based on practicing the scenario, is to run at a 45 degree angle off to the unarmed side of the attacker until you are a few steps past him (or her), and then swing around to try and get behind the attacker. This should give you enough time, he states, to get your firearm into play.

    Although I didn't have time to do my normal quick review, Greg posted his normal Weekly Knowledge Dump last Friday that you should definitely check out. One of his links is to a news article about a moviegoer who was brutally beaten after asking a couple to move out of his reserved seating. Greg comments: "My late friend Dr. William Aprill had an important quote describing most criminals.  He said 'They are not like you.'" 

    This segues into an article Greg posted last week entitled “I Saw an Opportunity and I Took It.”  In it, he recounts an incident when he was still working as a police officer, responding to a report of a stolen bike. With the description of the suspect from several witnesses, he was quickly able to run down the criminal. While booking the suspect, he asked the guy why he stole the bike. The explanation he received from the crook, who was homeless, was that the crook had the opportunity to stay with a friend that night rather than going to the homeless shelter, but his friend's home was a four hour walk and he didn't want to spend four hours walking in the rain. So he saw the unlocked bike and took it. As Greg explains:

    He wasn’t mentally ill. He knew right from wrong. But he had absolutely no remorse about taking a bike from some girl who probably needs it as just badly as he did. The thought of what the victim would experience didn’t even register in his mind. He “saw an opportunity” and took it. He took a college girl’s only means of transportation, because he didn’t want to be inconvenienced by a long walk.

    This is what most folks don’t understand about serious criminals. The fact that the victim of the crime would be affected in a negative manner is not even an afterthought. Your feelings and concerns mean absolutely NOTHING to this criminal. He doesn’t care if you live or die, let alone how “inconvenienced” you will be if he takes all of your stuff or beats you within an inch of your life. If you literally had ZERO concern about the well being of your neighbors and fellow humans, what kind of atrocities would you be capable of committing? That’s something that few people consider.

    Unfortunately, the majority of the hard core criminals I encountered felt the same way. You are literally nothing more than an obstacle they must overcome to achieve their goal. Most of the serious criminals out there think you and I are merely pawns on the chessboard of life. They will destroy everything you know and love if it means that they will benefit in the wake of the destruction. You are completely expendable in their eyes.

    Unfortunately, its not just hardened criminals that are like that. Although the exact percentage seems to vary depending on the study, roughly 4% of the population are sociopaths (although I've seen figures as high as 15%) and about 1% of the population are psychopaths (although it is much higher among business executives). "Roughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons," reported Forbes in 2019. Right now, many sociopaths and psychopaths play by the rules, but that could change in a SHTF situation.