I was mugged today.

[Purple]

I've been held up at gunpoint (was a bank teller, guess how long I stayed at THAT job).  I had the same feelings in a lot of ways.  Thankfully the FBI were really helpful and very proud of me as I was able to trick the guy so that we could catch him, and the bank paid for me to see a psych guy.  It will be 6 years ago this July, and I still have nightmares about it.  I did feel violated.  And I felt very weak because after he left and I wrote down his exact description I sat down and balled.  I had been so afraid I wouldn't see my daughters again (they were just 2 1/2 years and 6 months old at the time).

So it does get better after awhile, but it will likely be something you never forget.  My best advice would be to be proactive.  Report it, provide the best description you can recall, and if it makes you feel better learn self-defense or whatever you think you'll need or will make you feel better.  Best of luck to you.

And this is a total aside because I'm terrible prejudiced...move to the country.  :)

[Elvi]

In all the time I spent in London, (during my ill gotten youth where I wandered the streets late at night, by myself), I walked home in the pitch black, through very unsavoury areas and was never mugged or even aproached once.
During the time I travelled many places/countries, by myself, I was never mugged.

When did someone attempt to mug me?
When I was nine months pregnant.
I was walking back from my firends, a street away from home, the only thing I had on me was a pack of cigarettes, with two in and a throw away lighter and my house keys.

When these two blokes aproached me, they threatened to knife me if I didn't give them money.
I held the keys in my fist, with the pointed ends sticking through my fingers, told them what I had on me and asked them if they really thought that them loosing eyes and having chunks torn out of them was worth it, they left very quickly.

The moral here?

Muggers pick easy targets.
If you don't look like a victim, then you won't be.

It wasn't brave what I did, it wasn't stupid either, it is what I do.

I say that I have only been mugged, but that doesn't mean that I don't know what it's like to have a gun/sawn off shot gun rammed in my face, or a knife flashed at me in an effort to intimidate me and I have reacted accordingly.
There is no set rule to what you should and shouldn't do, there should be no shame attatched to what you do when you are faced with that situation.


Ajoxer,
You fell for the oldest trick in the book, as soon as you stopped for him, he had you, whether he had a knife on him or not.

My advice is, don't feel stupid, a coward, or anything other than a person who was mugged.
Learn from your experience, then push it behind you.

*hugs*
 

[Ajoxer]

Heh... I was actually almost certainly capable of taking this guy on in a fist fight, if he didn't actually have a knife or something, being at least half a foot taller and probably weighing something on the order of a hundred pounds more than the guy. He didn't even flash a knife, but at 95 cents, I didn't feel like it was worth shitting myself over.

It's just that my mind goes on to wondering what if the circumstances were different... *shrug.*

[King_Furby]

The prob is you never know who has a gun and who does not. I would react the same way..heck i would just try to remember his/her face so i could submit a police report.

[Mistiq]

Yeah, things like that are why I hardly ever leave my house. Not out of fear, just because I know I'd be an easy target for something like that, a mugging, my lack of balance and all. That's all so why I don't visit my best friend as often as I could. She may still have some very sick men living down the block, as well as two blocks away. I would have just cooperated because it was the only thing I could do...Well I might've maybe...no that wouldn't have been smart at all. Hitting someone with a crutch would do something, but I don't trust myself in that situation. After all, I have had to do that a couple of times with the punks I went to school with. One time though I went to hit this one board and she gapped it and pulled it in a way so that I almost fell on my face.