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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.