YOU DO YOU: HOW APPLYING YOUR THINKING TO OTHERS CAN BE PROBLEMATIC

Dr. William Aprill was excellent at helping us regular folks understand the motivations and thought processes of the violent criminal actor.

His work helped us to understand that something worthless or insignificant to us could be incredibly valuable or important to someone else with different priorities from some other walk of life.

Predation is just a social behavior (Dr. Aprill liked to point out that “violence, oddly enough, is a social act” as it requires other people). As such, I took this idea of victim selection and expanded on it a little to apply to other less severe and hopefully far more common aspects of our day-to-day lives.

There are lots of folks who dismiss dressing well as “unimportant” or who consider using someone’s appearance as part of how you view them as “snobby.” Ironically, many of these same folks can rattle off pre-assault indicators and other physical cues they use to profile people.

The point is that just because it doesn’t matter to a certain person in a specific situation doesn’t mean that it’s not important or valuable.

Because They Are Not Like You.

The better you understand who “they” are and what “they” value, the more easily you can navigate a broader range of social environments.

The Suited Shootist
Alex Sansone took his first formal pistol class in 2009, and has since accumulated almost 500 total hours of open enrollment training from many of the nation's top instructors including Massad Ayoob, Craig Douglas, Tom Givens, Gabe White, Cecil Burch, Chuck Haggard, Darryl Bolke, and many others. Spending his professional life in the corporate world, Alex quickly realized incongruities between "best practices" in the defensive world, and the practical realities of his professional and social limitations. "I've never carried a gun professionally. I'm just a yuppie suburbanite that happens to live an armed lifestyle. Having worked in the corporate arena for the last decade, I've discovered that a lot of the "requirements" and norms of gun carriers at large aren't necessarily compatible with that professional environment. I also have a pretty diverse social background, having grown up in the Northeast, and there are many people in my life that are either gun-agnostic or uncomfortable with the idea of private gun ownership. This has afforded me not only insights into how we are perceived by different subcultures, but how to manage and interact with people that may not share your point of view without coming across as combative or antisocial. This is why my focus is the overlooked social aspects of the armed lifestyle."