Okay, so the potential gap in the way we think about risk mitigation that I was looking for is is based on our tendency to turn
inward for solutions, rather than
outward.
The $500 was sort of a red herring, though it could certainly have been spent productively, and I will describe how I would have spent it below, but with a bit of creativity, the same defensive measure could be had for free.
One of the things in particular that some of the responses touched on, but didn't really nail squarely, was the potential defensive opportunities presented by simply talking to people about your situation. For example, sitting down with your wife, best friend, attorney, business associates, etc. and explaining that an attempt on your life will occur in the next five days and asking for their input on working the problem. Some of the responses did include efforts at reaching out to others for assistance, but I think that this step is critical and should be at the top of the list of defensive measures, but it requires a person to resist the urge to think in terms of fight or flight at the individual level and bring others into the situation to potentially expand the problem in a way that makes the discovery of the solution easier.
Another defensive measure that I believe is critically important is understanding exactly what your limitations are that create vulnerability in the first place, and that's where our natural survival skills and instincts come into play because they do a pretty good job of keeping us alive, but they also have critical weaknesses, especially when it comes to our need to sleep and our inability to continuously monitor a full 360 degrees of our environment for potential threats (predators have a narrower field of vision because we're not used to being hunted, right?).
There was a strong desire to change the scenario so that the risk could be reduced, as opposed to managed more effectively. I consider this another variety of turning inward and going with the flight instinct (flee the danger!). It's a strong instinct.
Finally, I wanted to see how much of a tendency there was to gravitate toward
gear as opposed to
technique when trying to manage uncertainty. There were some guns and bulletproof vests, but there were also some really good creative ideas that didn't gravitate toward increasing the available force or increasing one's resistance to force (which are both inward-oriented approaches to risk management).
I hope that you agree that the defensive measure described below would not only mitigate the risk in my hypothetical case, but it would also mitigate a vast range of other legitimate risks that are only dangerous because you don't have any way of seeing them coming at you.
Here's the situation:
On the first night of the experiment, you and a friend are walking across the parking lot to a professional sporting event (you've had tickets for a long time, and you really wanted to attend the event). As you approach the venue, you see a man in front of you hit the woman he is with. They are only a few steps in front of you, and you easily step between them as he goes to hit her again. In the second or two that your action buys, the woman runs off into the crowd and you and the man make eye contact for a fraction of a second before he runs off into the crowd chasing her. The look you exchange is not that charged, and you are careful not to seem as if you are challenging him, but more like you just happened to be walking that way and you got between them. You are careful not to seem confrontational since you know someone is going to try to kill you, and the moment passes without leaving much of an impression on you.
On your way back to your car after the game, the same guy sees you walking in front of him. He is now very drunk and for whatever reason decides to run up behind you and shove you very hard. He pushes you hard enough that you fall almost instantly, and on your way down you hit your head on a piece of concrete, fracturing your skull. Witnesses would later testify in the attacker's murder trial that after you fell he walked up to you deliberately and kicked you in the head near the fracture, which proved to be the fatal blow.
Although there are numerous ways the attack could have been prevented, a simple solution would have been if someone had been walking behind you to alert you to the danger approaching you from the rear in enough time for you to take evasive action. If you had known he was approaching a moment before he shoved you you could have easily braced your fall or simply moved out of his path.
For $500 you could have hired someone to simply walk behind you in your blind spot as much as possible and act like a set of eyes in the back of your head. This person wouldn't be a bodyguard (a bodyguard would cost WAY more than $500 for five days), and it might even be a friend or family member who agreed to perform this function for free for a few days because you were concerned that something might happen to you. Their job would simply be to yell if they saw anything coming at you from the back that was outside your field of vision. It's a simple and easy job that someone could be located to perform for $100 or less per day (they would only need to work a few hours each day, since you would only need them with you when you were out in public).
The rationale you would have used in selecting this defensive measure is that you couldn't possibly foresee what type of attacker you would be defending against, and thus you would realize that you would mostly need to rely on your own heightened senses in identifying the danger as early as possible to give you time to react, but no matter how aware you were of your surroundings, you would still have that large blind spot simply because you couldn't see 360 degrees around you at all times. You would essentially be betting that as a sitting duck anything that would give you more reaction time would improve your chances of survival, as opposed to focusing on specific defensive measures like a firearm or other weapon that you might never have a chance to draw because the attack would be over so quickly.
The point I was hoping to illustrate is that a little bit of
interdependence can sometimes be better than a whole lot of
independence, but sometimes we don't see these solutions because when faced with a crisis, we may instinctively gravitate toward self-reliance, which can ironically make us MORE vulnerable if we fail to comprehend the true nature of the risks we are trying to mitigate, which often comes down to a blow that is only lethal because we didn't see it coming.
I think that the answers that called for hiring some kind of protection were basically correct, but I wanted the experiment to illustrate that the type of protection you needed didn't rely on any special skills in the person you hired to assist with your protection. You truly just needed another set of eyes to dramatically improve your chances of survival.
For many other potential scenarios where an attacker delivers a fatal blow, having a warning even a second or two before the attack occurs could be enough to save your life.
Another defensive measure that would have probably saved you life and that I was sort of hoping someone might suggest would have been if you had simply worn a sturdy helmet of some kind during the five days. As I thought about many types of fatal attacks, I kept coming back to a lack of strong head and face protection as the difference between life and death in many of them. Think about how many different activities call for head and face protection that only require minimal protection for the rest of the body (e.g., construction work, motorcycle riding, batting in baseball, horse racing, rock climbing, etc.).
So if you want to stay safe, think about enlisting others to help complement your own survival instincts and consider wearing a helmet.
Thanks for participating. I hope you found that stimulating.