Probably not such a likely outcome since the encounter took place at a very busy cafe in a busy big box shopping centre. Still, I would have wanted a couple of extra friends on hand for intimidation and maybe someone with a video camera with a really bright light.
Here in safe, polite Toronto, there was an altercation a few years past on a street crowded with shoppers seeking Boxing Day deals. It ended in a running gun battle and a passerby was killed.
I agree that death is an unlikely outcome, but i beg of you, never bet your life on the rationality of petty criminals who engage their "fight or flight" reflex.
> I agree that death is an unlikely outcome, but i beg of you, never bet your life on the rationality of petty criminals who engage their "fight or flight" reflex.
This seems a pretty unhealthy attitude. Basically you're saying to never, ever attempt to protect your belongings from a petty criminal.
If you have reason to believe that your life is truly at risk (e.g. you're in a dark alley, criminal has a gun), sure. You should probably surrender your property. If you do not believe that you are in danger, there's no reason to give up your property. You're just sacrificing your property for nothing, and emboldening those same criminals. Sitting in a crowded Starbucks with a couple of guys who are not visibly-armed is not a high-risk situation.
There's always some danger to your life. A random person on the street could snap and kill you for no reason. You can't dedicate your life to avoiding it. Don't make yourself powerless.
This seems a pretty unhealthy attitude. Basically you're saying to never, ever attempt to protect your belongings from a petty criminal.
Well now, we are going in an interesting direction. I live in Toronto. I am happy that we do not have as many firearms as you might find in Texas. There is a massive and somewhat difficult chasm to cross between the two cultures around the question of "Protecting your belongings from petty criminals."
I'm willing to engage you on this question, but I fear that the HN server will run out of disk space before we can find a common ground.
Whether you're in Texas or Toronto, the situation described in the article is unlikely to result in death or injury. Even in a situation where the criminals have guns, they are extremely unlikely to shoot you in the middle of a Starbucks for no reason.
And yes, I do mean "no reason". There is literally nothing for the criminals to gain by shooting you. They would change from petty thieves who simply lose the laptop and may yet go unpunished to murderers with many witnesses to the crime. This is a major loss, with no upside. Being a petty criminal indicates that they aren't the smartest, but it doesn't indicate that they are completely insane.
I feel that you must be drastically overestimating the danger in this situation to justify simply surrendering the laptop. There's not even a threat of violence here. You're making a chain of assumptions that takes you from "petty thieves" to "willing murderers". That's a hell of a leap.
Life carries risk. Sooner or later you're going to die. But if you spend your entire life trying to avoid any possibility of death, not only will you die, but you will die never having lived.
Toronto is an enormous city. Even incredibly rare risks will show up on the evening news there once a month. Don't organize your life around the bullshit that shows up on the news. If you want to reduce risks, start with some statistics.
I agree with the sentiment, but nobody is talking about organizing life around not risking death, we are talking about whether to go out of our way to confront people we assume are criminals.
"Criminal" doesn't mean much these days. You're probably a criminal yourself if you've driven a car in the US or if you lived in the US after 1980 between the ages of 18 and 21. (I don't remember if Canadian law is as absurd.) The question is whether a petty thief is gonna cap you because you caught him stealing your laptop, and the answer is that it's very unlikely. The statistics khafra posted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2743973 suggest that, on average, you'd have to confront thieves between hundreds of times and tens of thousands of times before getting killed.
