[also] Glad I Did Not Draw

Inspired by reading the recent post from u/govt_surveillance, I have my own Glad I Did Not story. A combination of being sober, paying attention, thinking things through, but mostly sheer luck are the only reasons I survived this encounter.Let me preface by saying I used to live an entirely different life. I used to run with an entirely different crowd. Those times are over, but at the point in my life where this story happened, those days were not that far behind me.It had been a long day of dealing with too many people at work, followed by errands after work that took too long, dealing with more people. I'm less than a year sober, and in generally a very poor mood at this point. As I am navigating into my apartment complex, some people are stopped and essentially blocking the parking lot in my direction of travel on a blind corner. After a very impatient 45 seconds of waiting, I pulled around them and my tires chirp a bit. They get the 'do these people look as stupid as they are acting?' glare from me as I pull around them. I pulled in front of my unit to park in our one allotted slot, only to find that my brother had already parked his big stupid truck there. I angrily pull past and around to the back of the building, not even registering the SUV that is now following me. I pull into my parking spot at the back of the parking lot and stop. As I am getting out of my car, the SUV pulls up super close with the lights on. At this moment my brain is telling me it's time to get my pistol out. My windbreaker is zipped up and it's a little too snug to reach my Glock 19 in my IWB at 4 o'clock, so I decide to wait to see what's going down. I position my left shoulder towards the SUV and start thinking about my options, cursing my general lack of thinking this through (I'm a lot more careful about my outfits now...this was quite a few years ago). As I am turning towards the SUV the front doors open on both sides and two guys step out. A moment later they identify themselves as LEO. Unmarked SUV, no visible badges, no red/blue lights. We have a dialogue, they must guess from my body language that I am armed, they ask me and I tell them exactly what's going on from my end, including the fact that I have a current carry license (CPL). They decline to inspect my CPL, and instead ask me why I am carrying. 'For all lawful purposes' or 'self defense' don't pop into my head (those would be my replies now), instead I tell them that I used to run with some rough people and I don't run errands for them any longer, and I carry just in case they come calling again. They are very familiar with this group and try to establish if I was a member, I was not. In the end they leave me alone with a warning about driving too fast in the parking lot and being more careful.​If I had been intoxicated, a little more tired and angry, or maybe even just wearing a t-shirt (able to draw when the first impulse to do so hit me), I most likely would have taken the room temperature challenge. I have since learned to choose my clothing more carefully, to better meter my temper, and to adopt a different threat posture entirely when carrying (which is every day unless I am at my place of work or at church). I slow down, pay a lot more attention to what's happening, and keep my distance when I see an altercation or a road obstruction. Distance==options. Sure the police had a bad approach and could have improved greatly on how they rolled up on me, for all I knew I was about to get jumped or whacked. If I had been able to clear leather it's pretty likely at least the driver would have had a really bad day. **Most* of the encounters with LEO that result in the death of an otherwise innocent person are from a cascade of mistakes from both parties. In the information security space, this is referred to as the 'kill chain'. It is entirely under our control as armed civilians to disrupt this kill chain on our end more than 90% of the time. In these tragic situations someone's life could have been saved had it been handled better. I am not talking about obligation or justice or legality, or who was 'in the right'. The cemetery is full of people that had the right of way. I'm talking about the ability to make a different choice (sometimes counter to our ego) that results in not becoming dead, or not having to live with doing that to someone else. via /r/CCW https://ift.tt/3crGBD5