I’m sure most of you have heard the advice to get pepper spray, stun-guns, knives, or hold your keys in between your fingers when walking out to the car at night, but are you really ready? I mean you may have the self-defense weapon in your purse or pocket but how many times have you walked to your car and nothing has happened?
There in is the challenge. Complacency. Whatever you told yourself that would make you ready might not be ready. I have always been an advocate of learning a martial art or at the very least (and I mean least), a short term self-defense course but how many people do you know that do martial arts, self-defense courses and still workout (hopefully a lot!)? The realistic answer is very few.
Another trend is electronic distractions. Everything from music and texting is keeping people from being aware of their surroundings (assuming they had kept up with their self-defense training)!
What you need for your distracted loved one is a workable self-defense strategy! Something that your daughter will be holding along with her smart phone while walking and updating her facebook status. One such product I will breifly review here is the Self-Defense Lanyard!
I was approached to review this product although I was offered one for my review – I opted to buy one for myself and try it out. My concerns were two-fold.
One if my wife can never find anything in her purse. It is not uncommon to have to wait two minutes while she looks for her keys. She can shake the purse and hear them but then takes a lot of time to find them. You see as I guy – I only have to look in my pocket and I’ve retrieved my keys in seconds.
Secondly I want my wife after finding her keys easily, to be able to use her keys (since she is going to have them out anyway when walking through a parking lot at night), as an improvised weapon.
You see in California, pepper spray and stun guns are the only legal “self-defense weapons” allowed. Anything else someone prepares before hand to use out in public can be deemed an illegal weapon under California law.
So whatever you prepare for in advance has to muster the snuff test. Do you have a legitimate use for the “improvised self-defense weapon”? Do you normally use it in the “legitimate” and approved use?
Assuming you meet the snuff test and do not end up using your improvised “self-defense weapon” multiple times or in a way another reasonable person (California is big in the reasonable person standard) would not have done – you should be ok.
In that vein I gave the key chain holder to my wife selling her on the ease of finding her keys! And oh yeah if you ever had to – you could swing your keys at an attacker to create a diversion to get away.
I should say at Walmart I saw keys on a rope but I don’t think they would work as well because the rope has no stiffness and would easily fold up in a purse. The Lanyard I bought my wife here (Self-Defense Lanyard) since it is a strap – is long in a purse and so far – very easy for my wife to find.
I hope you have found this review helpful. I generally do not review too many self-defense products as I believe that most will not work as intended and everyone should learn a martial art.