To protect yourself from violent crime, you must be willing and able to act decisively when the criminal attacks.

Willing and able. We use that phrase a lot. When I was a child, I thought it was one big compound word: willing-and-able. But there’s a big difference between being willing to do something, and being able to do it. They aren’t the same thing at all, and the difference between the two might save your life.

Willingness covers the choices you might make, or that you could see yourself making. There’s a lot of territory hiding inside this question. Could you see yourself killing an intruder in your home, if that was the only way to assure your own survival? Could you make that choice quickly and without hesitation? Could you make that same decision if the intruder were a teenager, a woman, a mentally disabled person? Every criminal is someone’s son or daughter, someone’s child. But some decisions would be more heart-wrenching than others. Find the ones that make you hesitate, and explore them for yourself. Find the ones you’re confident with, and make sure your confidence is not misplaced.

These are tough questions.

Sometimes when people discuss questions like this, they will tell you there are no right answers and no wrong ones. That’s not quite true. The right answer is one you can come to peace with, that will enable you to act with decisive speed in the moment. The wrong answer is the one you cannot come to peace with, the one that will slow you down or stop you from acting. Nobody else can hand you the answers to questions like this. You have to look for them and find them on your own, because they must fit your own internal landscape.

Although you have to work out the answers for yourself, based on your own emotional and ethical wiring, other people can help you find good questions to ask. So can your own observations of the world. When you read or hear stories about how other people defended their lives from violent crime, you have an opportunity to think about these questions. When you hear about situations where others have needed to defend themselves, try picturing yourself in the same position. Then ask, “Would I be willing to do that?”

Ability is something else entirely. You might have no emotional or ethical problem with shooting an attacker, but not know where to aim in order to stop him quickly. Or you might be missing the skill it would take to hit him at the distance he is from you or at the speed he’s moving. You might be willing to shoot, but be unable to draw your pistol in time to save your life. You might not know how to deal with a physical attack. All of these things can be learned, but you won’t learn any of them by sitting around and thinking about it. You’ll have to step outside yourself to learn them, and it will take work.

There’s as much territory hiding inside able as there is inside willing. That’s because every situation is different. They aren’t all alike, and there’s no way to know what skills you will need until you need them. For example, you might be physically, emotionally, and ethically prepared to deal with one type of criminal attack, but not have the physical skill it would take to survive a different attack for which you were just as emotionally and ethically prepared.  You might be able to shoot with a high level accuracy, but move too slowly for the situation you face. For this reason, it’s good to stop sometimes and look at where your physical skills actually are. How do those skills stack up to the ones most often needed in the face of violence? Where can you improve your skill and ability?

Willing and able are really two halves of the same coin. That’s why they’re so often paired in conversation. Unfortunately, most of us have a natural tendency to stock up a lot of YES answers on our favorite side of the coin, and ignore the other half. But both halves matter. To defend yourself from a violent crime, both sides of the coin must be marked with a YES within the situation you face. The more YES answers you stack up in advance on both sides of the coin, the more prepared you become to deal with whatever life throws at you.

Are you willing and able?

Yesterday, I blogged about giving yourself permission to protect your own life. This isn’t really a one-step, one-time thing. It’s an ongoing process, a deliberate series of decisions to set yourself free from the things you didn’t realize were holding you back.

For example, last month one woman told me a story. I might write about that story in detail one of these days, but the short version was that she found herself in a hilariously uncomfortable – and potentially dangerous – place, simply because she didn’t want to be rude to a stranger. She did not have a script for telling a pushy, overly familiar man that she did not want to talk to him, and she had never given herself permission to break the social rule that says you don’t bluntly tell someone to go away and leave you alone. This is a woman who carries a gun, and who has made the mental and ethical decision to shoot somebody if she needs to. But she had never given herself permission to be rude to a stranger.

On one level, you might think that’s strange. I don’t. I think it’s normal. All of us carry cultural expectations around with us, things we learned in childhood, things we were taught in school, things our parents and our teachers and our classmates told us all the years we were growing up. All of us carry scars from times when we did something against the social norm, and caught hell for it. So we tend to grow up protecting and obeying those cultural ideals just as firmly as if breaking one could cause real danger to us – because in a lot of ways, it can. The pain of social rejection hurts, so we’ve trained ourselves to avoid that type of pain, and that’s normal.

Unfortunately, bad guys use those scripts, those expectations, those social rules. Here’s one example, from Debra Anne Davis’ brilliant 2005 article, “Betrayed by the Angel.” In that article, Davis tells her heart-wrenching story of a violent rape. She writes with brutal, compelling honesty about the choices she made, about the way the attacker used those choices against her, and how she came to grips, afterward, with what he had done. Most of all, she writes about the social script that says, Don’t be rude – and how that script betrayed her. She writes:

I’m 25 years old. I’m alone in my apartment. I hear a knock. I open the door and see a face I don’t know. The man scares me, I don’t know why. My first impulse is to shut the door. But I stop myself: You can’t do something like that. It’s rude.

I don’t invite him in, but suddenly he is pushing the door and stepping inside. I don’t want him to come in; he hasn’t waited to be invited. I push the door to close it, but I don’t push very hard; I keep remembering that it’s not polite to slam a door in someone’s face.

He is inside. He slams the door shut himself and pushes me against the wall. My judgment: He is very rude. I make this conscious decision: Since he is being rude, it is okay for me to be rude back. I reach for the doorknob; I want to open the door and shove him outside and then slam the door in his face, rude or not, I don’t care now. But frankly, I don’t push him aside with much determination. I’ve made the mental choice to be rude, but I haven’t been able to muster the physical bluntness the act requires.

Davis gave herself permission to act, but only in a limited way. She gave herself permission to be rude, but only to a point. She gave herself permission to respond, but only within carefully-set limits. She would “be rude” – but only after he was rude. She would physically shove him out the door – but not with too much force, too much suddeness, too much aggression. She held back. Because she didn’t want to be rude.

And here I must tread lightly. Because Davis, like every other survivor of violent crime, did the best she knew at the time. She responded as she had been trained to respond, in patterns she’d learned from her earliest childhood. The polite patterns she followed were not “bad” patterns. After all, those patterns had worked to protect her from emotional pain in almost every social interaction she’d ever had in her whole life. There’s absolutely no blame here, none whatsoever. This is how good people respond to unexpected, unusual encounters with predators who aren’t working from the same script. It is so normal that a great many people actually make a living from this type of social manipulation. Predatory criminals bet their lives, their incomes, and their liberty on good people responding in just this way.

Seeing how the magic trick works is not the same as blaming the audience for not seeing it. People make a living with this kind of sleight of hand.

Lots more to say about this subject, but that’s enough to chew on for today. Are you willing to be rude to protect yourself from needing to use violence to protect yourself?