Oh, If It Was That Easy

• Read this to be safe

• Download this app to be safe

There is so much bad guidance provided to our citizens and unfavorably, those who espouse these edicts are never held accountable for the legitimacy of their suggestions. As someone who has dedicated his entire adult life to the precise area of personal safety, the flippancy galls me.

The human experience carries a degree of personal risk and 100% safety is inconsistent with reality.

If you really want to be safe, prepare yourself physically, mentally and psychologically. Educate yourself by hiring, reading, or learning from an actual expert. Check their resume or assess their background in an effort to confirm the efficacy of the claims before taking their guidance. Don’t be distracted by the videos or enamored with the persona they have carefully created. Use curiosity, suspicion, and intuition to help you.

Constantly assess if they can really help you in your situation, with your capabilities, and capacities? Are they recommending something that will put you in prison or get you killed? Are they espousing some specific weapon - that only they sell and are willing to discount to you, today? Are they myopic in their approach to personal safety and constantly preach from the pulpit of only one tool for the job - the job of keeping yourself safe. What happens when that tool is not available at 40,000 feet, or in a public environment that forbids that tool - what now says the expert?

If learning about Active Shooter, are they just regurgitating Run-Hide-Fight through a canned PowerPoint or have they actually put some thought into what they are presenting. Do they notice you are incapable of running due to an injury or life circumstance? What are you to do in these situations? Perhaps you are responsible for infants, young children, patients, or the elderly who cannot Run or Fight effectively. What does the expert say here?

During your assessment, your common sense will formulate a smart question and I beg you to ask it. If the expert gets offended or angry - you have just exposed their amateur status. A professional has an answer for these situations and can happily provide sound guidance for your unique situation. And if they do not know, they will have the humility to say: Great question, let me look into that and I will get back to you with an answer.

At the end of the day, you are responsible for your own personal safety. I just hate that in the quest to get there you have to wade through the swamp of unrealistic and just bad guidance.

James Hamilton is a former FBI Special Agent.