A homeless man with a knife threatened to kill me yesterday.

This occurred downtown in a large midwestern city, in broad daylight, on a fairly busy street. My wife and I were walking to lunch in a decent area—not somewhere i would’ve expected this to happen. I was carrying a Glock 43x AIWB.While crossing the street, a disheveled homeless man was walking in the opposite direction shouting and cursing. I tried not to look at him and pulled my wife towards the curb, giving him a wide berth and averting my eyes.As we passed him, he immediately turned around and started following us while screaming and cussing me out—calling me a cracker, fggt, motherf*cker, every name in the book. We kept walking a little faster, and I just kept trying to ignore him. Eventually he made a disgusting comment about my wife which prompted me to finally stop, turn around and look at him. At this, he screamed “I’ll kill you bitch! That’s why I’ve got this knife!”He had a small folding knife—maybe 2-3 inches—raised and pointed at us. Dude was about 5 feet away at this point. This is the part where I’d like say that I did everything right and executed a perfect DGU. But I’m not gonna lie—I almost shit down my leg.I sort of froze up—I grabbed my wife and instinctively started backing away, before coming to my senses a few seconds later and remembering that I was carrying. I put my hand on the grip of my gun, but the guy had already turned around and started walking back the other way, so I didn’t draw. We got to safety, and I called 911.Things that went well: - Avoided responding to the verbal abuse / escalating - Got out of there, immediately called 911 - Wife and I weren’t harmed, and I didn’t have to shoot someoneThings that could’ve gone better - I should’ve been analyzing/profiling the guy as we approached instead of ignoring him—big lapse in situational awareness.We had never been to this restaurant so I was looking at my phone for directions as we were walking towards this guy—this was an okay part of the city so my guard was down. Again, major lapse in situational awareness.Failure to recognize the knife. This was a MAJOR fuck-up, and it is a function of the other two aforementioned fuck-ups. I probably would have drawn as soon as I had seen the knife—and definitely would’ve as soon as he started making threats. Really can’t overstate how lucky I got here.I sat on hold for 5 MINUTES waiting to talk to 911 dispatch—pretty bewildering. Really hammered home the fact that you cannot rely on police to protect you.I did not handle this situation perfectly at all, but wanted to share my takeaways/lessons I learned in hopes that it might help someone else. Comments/feedback are welcome via /r/CCW https://ift.tt/A6OaCQx