“Where there is risk, there must be choice.” – by someone I don’t know!
There is much to like in this quote. However, we should also try to promote “street-smart” critical thinking, and a street-smart critical thinker may have some follow-up questions when seeing this quote:
Who is responsible for determining risk?
Who is responsible for conveying risk?
What happens if there are mistakes in determining risk?
What happens if risk is expressed misleadingly?
Who benefits if mistakes are made?
Who experiences the harm if mistakes are made?
Are there other influences besides risk that may influence a person’s choice?
To help understand risk, I encourage people to read the books Risk Savvy and Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. The book Risk Savvy introduced me to “fact boxes” by the Harding Center for Risk Literacy. These fact boxes cover a lot of preventative medical treatments and strive to convey easily understandable figures using natural frequencies, rates, benefits, and harms. I enjoyed reading about them so much that I decided to investigate what it would take to develop a fact box for carrying a concealed firearm (CCF) in my book.
I hope my book can be part of the conversation around holistically looking at self-defense, civilian violent crime, and the circumstances around civilian violent crime. Then, hopefully, we can see how to move forward with additional research and find effective self-defense techniques for everyone.