Have you ever been confronted by physical violence in the street & if so how did you respond?

I become another person.

Fight or flight. I do not run.

No, I honestly never have. I truly hope I’m not exceptional.

OK, I’ve seen drunken bar fights, but never been part of one or had any reason to intervene between two drunks who couldn’t handle their liquor.

When I was younger I used to fight. I liked to hit, and I wasn’t really afraid of anything.

When I was even younger, I carried a weapon and had no compunctions about using it, but I ran with a very rough crowd at the time.

The last time someone threatened me it was a very large young man in NYC, in a fight over a parking spot. I recited his license number to him and told me that if he assaulted me I would have him arrested. He contented himself with spitting on my car and screaming foul language. I’m old.

@pdworkin Like your style. Is there an echo in here?

@pdworkin Damn it’s gone are my eyes playing tricks with me I could have sworn the answer was duplicated. Anyway as I said good on you.

when I was a kid I was trying to buy weed on a rotting island in the dutch west indies and got robbed at gunpoint. it scared the hell out of me and really shook me up. Much later, when I was living a street life, I was confronted in various ways and was never that scared again. I would get very loud and in their face or attract attention in some way. Sometimes I would grab whatever was at hand and hit whoever very very hard before they had a chance to have a go at me.

@ucme That seems to be happening a lot lately.

Somebody punched me in the back of the head outside a pub so I took them down ;-)

@Snarp What, the “double post”? I’m sober it can’t have been me~ Thanks for the clarification.

@ucme Yes, the double post.

I don’t see such things anymore. But in the neighborhood I grew up in, I saw it all the time, and I’d run away. I was (and am) a small person, and the people perpetrating the violence were usually much bigger, older, armed and in a rage. I learned well enough in the house I grew up in not to be near someone who’s in a rage, because if you’re small, you’re a pretty good target for the rager, and in my “home,” I also learned a lot of objects can double as weapons. I was scared a lot on the streets in my area.

It was both young men and women who were constantly spoiling for fights. There was one girl on the block who carried a super-thick chain just to whip people with when she was angry. I now wonder just what crap was going on in her house that she was beating people who were supposed to be her friends with this thing on the streets. I guess after seeing Roots as a kid, I find whipping people to be especially awful, demeaning and gruesome.

Once, when I was in 10th grade at the horrible city high school I first attended, a girl threatened to beat me up. I didn’t really know her; she was a girl in my Art 101 class, and was larger and older than me. She set upon me one day after class on the pavement a few blocks form the school, and I was ready to get my ass kicked, but a friend of mine stopped her. To this day, I have no idea what set her off, but after that incident, I started looking for a different high school to go to and transferred out the next year. I had no wish to be anyone else’s target for when they were having a bad day. I was getting quite enough of that at the house.

The frat boys I saw later during uni fighting outside the college tap house was nothing by comparison.

Today I take karate and if necessary, I can defend myself, though I mainly participate in it to become a more disciplined person.

@Snarp Thought so, again cheers!

Never as an adult. Once as a tourist in Genoa I heard a woman on the street calling for help. We were in our hotel rooms, but couldn’t see anything.

Last time something like this happened I was a 14-year-old kid when someone on the school bus attacked me.

Two years ago on the way back to my car from a baseball game in downtown Cincinnati, a homeless looking-(ish) black man asked me for a dollar. I declined, and he then said, “How about I try your wallet?” Standing directly in front of me, he reached his hand out as if he was going to reach into my front pocket. (???...i don’t think he was a very bright criminal.) I quick grabbed his hand and broke his wrist. He cursed at me and walked away. I called 911 just to let them know he was injured and what street he was on, and then got in my car and went home. That’s about it though…

@redsfan1324 Daaaaamn.

I saw it as I drove into a gas station. There were a few people beating each other up while their friends urged them on or watched. Looked pretty violent. They were right in front of the store doors too. I stayed inside the car, considered dialing 9–1-1, but my impulsive friend got out, hoping to break it up. I was livid that he got out of the car, because they could have turned on him (or someone in the crowd could have). You never know if someone is concealing weapons too in these occasions. So, in this case I stayed back and in the safety of my vehicle while my friend tried to get involved.

Luckily, as more customers arrived by car and started approaching the situation, the two broke it up, with the help of their friends. That’s my story.

I was walking behind this bar some years back, and there was a guy at a hotdog stand, selling snacks. Out of nowhere, three or five dudes popped out of the bar and rushed the guy behind the stand and beat the crap out of him. I have no idea why, but I do know that this bar was notorious for hard drugs.
They were probbaly pissed because someone was selling food on their turf or something? I don’t know, but it was sad, scary and disturbing. I mean that poor guy never stood a chance. I was pretty far so I didn’t see any “detail” but I really didn’t want to anyways. I walked off into another direction, got in front of the bar, used a pay phone to call the police and left as quick as I could.
They wanted me to stay there until they got there, but I didn’t haha, and anyways when I mentioned the name of the bar I’m sure they weren’t surprised.

The last time was not exactly on the street but in a bar. Waitress tells drunk he’s shut off. Drunk smashes beer bottle on the edge of the bar and goes after the waitress with it. Yours truly earns 23 stitches taking it away from said drunk. I’m not as fast as I used to be. Ruined a nice jacket, too.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land—23 stitches? Eeep. :(

I’ve kicked ass and have gotten my ass kicked. Was witness to a drive-by. Was “stabbed” (by stabbed, I mean barely scrapped) in the ribs.

Enough of that, however. I like living.

@Symbeline: The worst thing was the blood on my favorite jacket. When the deputy arrived, I was sitting on the drunken couruer de bois, having rendered him hors de combat. The deputy was amazed that I never drew my weapon. Fortunately this piece d’excremente had been drinking Labatts and the blue glass was easy to pick out of my arm. For the next three months the proprietor refused to give me a bill for anything (but I still left the equivalent of what I ate and drank as a tip for the waitress and bartender).

The reason I didn’t draw my weapon was that I knew the guy was too far gone to to be deterred by the sight of it (a known addict de drogue). It would have to be tuer d’un coup de pistolet or H2H. I decided not to kill.