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How many times have you heard of muggers randomly beating people up once they've surrendered their valuables in your local area vs. just online paranoia? You say "you spend time in cities at night", but I've lived in cities for decades, including walking late at night, seen drug dealing and been shouted at by mentally ill homeless people, and both never have felt the need to be armed and also never needed to be so. My preparation for a questionable area is "don't bring a lot of cash", not fantasies about how someone holding me up with a knife will somehow let me draw and use a gun while they stand there. Handguns just aren't good self-defense weapons.
And if you can afford a gun, you can afford to lose the loose cash in your wallet. You'd need to be mugged regularly for a gun to be cheaper than the cash.
Minimizing risk is giving them the money, or failing that actual self-defense courses for close combat, not imagining a ranged weapon will protect you when at arms length. There's a reason self-defense courses don't teach gun-fu, but instead de-escalation/situational awareness, followed by running away, and only then if that's not immediately available, stunning attacks that give you the window to escape. Even highly skilled combatants want to get away from a fight ASAP. If you try to point a gun at someone with a knife to you, you're likely to just end up in a wrestling match followed by likely losing it and getting shot.
What scenario are you imagining where your attacker is running at you waving a knife from a distance? That's just not how muggings work. Even in this scenario, anything under 6 meters means the attacker stabs you before you draw and fire.
I hear much more about random assualts than muggings. I've been nearly assaulted several times, and have been randomly sexually assaulted twice.
I mean, honestly, how tall are you and how much do you weigh?
Drawing doesn't take long if you regularly practice. It's not a western stand off.
Talk to anyone in law enforcement, a gun is always better than your hands, at any range. Self defense simply isn't practical for most smaller people. I don't want a fair fight, I want to live.
Not about the money it's about safety, also not about cash, it's also losing very important documents(Visa/Residency, passport, etc) or losing a phone that you may be stranded without(a genuine danger in towns/small cities in certain countries).
Yes running away is good, but not always feasible, a lot of the time if you're sure to lose a fight you aren't an Olympic runner either.
Don't point a gun at anyone unless you plan to pull the trigger, immediately.
You misunderstand the "21 foot rule" that is comparing draw speed to someone sprinting at you reaching you. It has nothing to do with you losing a fight. A gun in a melee range fight is still at least as if not more than effective than a knife (there are many examples of people being stabbed but still saving themselves from the assailant). Squeeze the trigger as fast as you can versus thrusting in and out/slashing. A lot of comparisons people try in self defense training is 1 shot/cut = immobalized- that's often not right. A knife you can take the brunt of with your arms, yes you will be severely injured, but a gun can quickly and easily penetrate to vital organs.
But of course yeah nothing will save you 100% of the time, but it's a whole lot better than nothing.
I didn't say "hands", I said "close combat". Both of those links are about ranking self-defense tools. One of them is literally from a PI and professional self-defense instructor. Not a cop, but more relevant to the topic of individual self-defense. You seem to think your smaller stature means other weapons will fail but your gun will be a trump card, but once you're in close-combat, firing a gun is just as much a conflict of brawn and martial skill, and the way you have to use a gun makes it easier to control or disarm than a knife with a more limited area of danger. Yeah, if you get that area on exactly the right spot and have the wherewithal to pull the trigger before things move again, you win, but you're likely not that skilled in gun-fu and even if you get off a shot that hits the target it won't disable your attacker.
In close combat guns are too easy to disarm, too hard to use effectively, and with a high likelihood of being used against you. They're fine for home defense, if you expect to be shot at, or have a known danger approach from range, but your example worries were muggings.
Once you're in hand to hand with someone wielding a knife, or who is just physically more powerful than you, you're probably going to lose. The knife fighter doesn't just close to knifing range and trade blows like a video game, they're grabbing your arm and starting a grapple. Fights are chaotic and sometimes the weaker or more poorly armed (for the circumstances of the fight) person wins, but once the distance is closed, a gun is at a disadvantage. Cops, who spend time training for these situations, miss most of their shots from short range, and that's with the advantage of usually being able to start the confrontation with their gun out and ready. Once someone can actually grab the gun/arm of the shooter, it's not a gunfight anymore and most other weapons are superior.
No one on any of the self-defense sites say this, and the self-defense trainer explicitly says a gun is worse. It just sounds like you have fantasies from movies and explicitly ignore real life experts who don't tell you what you want to hear.