this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
90 points (97.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43757 readers
2316 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I couldn’t get pepper spray without a license, so I went with the knife.
That law has since changed in MA, and I hope that my telling that story to Elizabeth Warren helped change it.
I was utterly horrified to discover I couldn’t get pepper spray. I couldn’t even keep myself reliably enrolled in Mass Health, as awesome as it was.
No license needed for a knife so I got that instead. Now since a knife can’t actually stop an attack very well, I had to use it as a deterrent.
To do that I had to promise myself I would give anyone who attacked me life altering consequences. Once I had that established, I stopped getting fucked with.
Before I armed myself, after the attack, it was like I had a crack in my aura. Predatory people could smell the fear on me. Had a few weird run-ins that almost turned into fights. One time a guy just put his hand out and stopped me. It was terrifying.
The thing that hurt really bad about the attack was the way the guy stumbled drunkenly away, probably forgetting about me, having zero consequences. So at least I can prevent that from happening again.