A Reddit user said the encounter happened while he was walking home from a bar near a university late at night. According to his comment in the thread, he first noticed two college-aged guys in puffy jackets messing around near a university building. At that point, he did not lock onto them as a serious threat. They just looked like a pair of young guys loitering and acting stupid, the kind of thing people see all the time in college areas and usually walk past without a second thought.
That changed once he passed them. He wrote that he heard fast footsteps behind him and decided to cross the street. That could have broken the pattern if the two guys were just heading the same way, but it did not. He said he heard them step off the curb and follow him across. So he changed his angle again, cutting more sharply across the street to see whether they would keep tracking him. According to the post, they stayed right on his heels the whole time. At that point he was no longer dealing with a vague bad feeling. He was watching two strangers mirror his movements in real time while the distance stayed tight.
He said that was when he stopped. He got his hand into his jacket pocket and onto his .38, then turned around to face them. From the way he told it, there was not some huge dramatic speech. He looked at the guy standing there and simply said, “I have a gun.” The man did not suddenly apologize or try to act like it was all a misunderstanding. According to the comment, he cursed at him and called him a pussy, but he also stopped where he was. The poster used that pause to cross back the other way, putting space between himself and the pair instead of waiting to see if the confrontation got any closer.
Then the second guy came back into it. He ran up to join his buddy, and the two of them started walking parallel to the poster instead of directly behind him. He wrote that they stayed with him like that until he stopped again and just stared at them. Only then did they finally break off. He said they waited a few seconds looking at him, then cut down an alley and disappeared. Even after that, he did not just relax and head straight home. According to the post, he took a circuitous route back specifically to make sure they were not trying to pick him up again farther down the way.
He said he never found out what they really wanted. In his own words, he was not sure whether they were trying to rob him or were just the kind of idiots who go around looking to beat somebody up for the fun of it. But he also made clear he had zero interest in sticking around long enough to find out which one it was. That uncertainty is really the whole story: a late walk home, two guys who did not look that dangerous at first, footsteps behind him, both of them following every angle change he made, and a moment where putting a hand on the gun and saying the words out loud was enough to keep things from going any farther.
What do you think — if two guys kept copying every move you made on a late walk home and stayed right on your heels across the street, would you have stopped and warned them like he did, or kept moving and hoped they finally peeled off?
Original Reddit post: Do you have a self defense story?
