It's your civic duty...

... to read Principles of Personal Defense by the late Col. Jeff Cooper. I'm not kidding. Not only is there an absolute wealth of knowledge in the book, it's short - my copy is all of 79 pages of big print, some pictures and blank page faces - so it takes about 20 minutes to read. You have no excuse for not doing so. Few people can teach you so much about proper mindset in so little time. My only regret is that I didn't read this book many, many years ago.

Since I've read it just once (I should commit the entire thing to memory) I'll share my initial favorite quote from the book, from the "Aggressiveness" chapter:

Now how do we cultivate an aggressive response? I think the answer is indignation. Read the papers. Watch the news. These people have no right to prey upon innocent citizens. They have no right to offer you violence. They are bad people and you are quite justified in resenting their behavior to the point of rage. Your response, if attacked, must not be fear, it must be anger. The two emotions are very close and you can quite easily turn one into the other. At this point your life hangs upon your ability to block out all thoughts of your own peril, and to concentrate utterly upon the destruction of you enemy. Anger lets you do this. The little old lady who drives off an armed robber by beating on him with her purse is angry, and good for her!

The foregoing is quite obviously not an approved outlook in current sociological curcles. That is of no consequence. We are concerned here simply with survival. After we have arranged for our survival we can discuss sociology.

I feel like Luke Skywalker when Ben Kenobi said something to him to the effect of "you've taken your first step into a larger world..."