We all try to live in Condition Yellow, but our mundane lives lull us into an often-false sense of security.

For those of you who don’t know the Cooper Color Codes, you can check out the box explaining things:

I’m a firm believer that we should never be in Condition White unless we are behind a locked door or have another means of protection. But I digress.

Check out the video attached here. It’s a couple years old, but it shows just how oblivious people become when they feel like they are someplace safe:

This video is an important reminder. You are not safe on public transportation and you are not safe just because you are in a crowd and there are lots of witnesses around. The bad guy in this video is just walking through a city bus pointing his gun at people and demanding they give up their smart phones. Criminals can and will strike anywhere. It is our job to be ready for them, because being ready gives us more time to react and avoid the danger, if possible.

But, as much as we would like to, we can’t ALWAYS be living in Condition Yellow. And if you are in Condition Yellow, can you be making that 360-degree scan often enough to be alert to danger all around you? The short answer is no, you can’t live in a perfect world of situational awareness at all times. Sometimes you have to be responsive and you can see that as the video keeps rolling.

What you see is a prime example of why you must control distance when you are using a gun. In this case, the bad guy thinks that, by sticking a gun in his victim’s face, he will have the upper hand. What he doesn’t seem to understand is that action defeats reaction. The good guy simply grabs the gun and pushes it out of the way. Now the fight is on and the good news is the gun is no longer pointed at the good guy. Look at the move he employs. Very likely the victim in this attack had no real self-defense training, but by simply grabbing the gun and pushing it against the bad guy’s body he effectively takes that gun out of the fight.

The trick is, if you are pushing the gun against your attacker’s body, you need to keep advancing and keep the pressure on. If the attacker does get a shot off, the fact that you have hold of the gun will likely cause a malfunction. But you still want to keep control of that gun. Grab it with both hands if you can and shove our attacker hard against a wall or other barrier.

This column is not a treatise on specific self-defense tactics, but rather to stress the ideas that crime can happen anywhere and, once you commit to a course of action, violence and power will be required to come out victorious. If you are going to fight, fight hard.

But if you are paying attention, you might just be able to avoid the fight.