Well, your response to a situation needs to evaluate the threat of the situation. No matter what your situation is, you don't want to try to go hero on it. If

Well, your response to a situation needs to evaluate the threat of the situation. No matter what your situation is, you don't want to try to go hero on it. If someone has a weapon and wants your money, you give it to them. Your goal is to try to give yourself an opportunity to run. Throw your wallet behind the attacker a little ways. They will need to turn their backs to go get it, which they will if that's what they are after. If you're in a different situation where someone is trying to herd you into a more isolated area or especially into a car, you use what you have at hand to try and fend them off enough to get a chance to run. Only bad things happen when people move you to more isolated places, and if someone is trying to force you into a car, it's worth doing whatever you can because you are probably not getting out of that car alive, in good shape, or into a better situation than the one you are currently in. In any situation other than a routine mugging, I'd use an umbrella or anything I had at hand to at least try to equalize the situation. To give me enough space to get some escape velocity. An umbrella isn't the worst idea if it's a knife. You want distance from a knife. An umbrella is quite a bit longer than a knife. If you can discourage the person long enough to get you a head start for running, then it was a good gamble. Again, by the time you've decided to engage with someone in this way, you are already pretty certain that they aren't just after some cash. They're after your life, or your ass. And that's the only time you should ever consider engaging a stranger in combat. That was the training I got from the police trainers that taught the CHL classes I took in Texas. We practiced a lot of stuff about how to disarm someone at close range, but the lesson was always this: run if you can. It's hard to shoot someone who's moving even at close range. If you get desperate, these are some last-ditch things you can try to keep yourself from being moved to an isolated place where you can (will) be raped, tortured, or murdered. But the best defense against any of that is to have some situational awareness, and to look like you have situational awareness. Make it clear to anyone who might be after you that you are watching and alert and won't be taken by surprise. Unless someone really is after you personally, most people will look for a different target. Oh, P.S. The other training we got was that if you're in trouble within earshot of people, don't yell that you're being mugged or raped. Yell that there's a fire or that someone's been hit by a car or something like that. Anything that makes sense in the context that doesn't sound like a crime in progress. People will shy away from that, whereas people will very often come to help out with something that doesn't sound dangerous to them personally. Ironically, a group of pedestrians showing up to see what's going on will often have more impact on a crime in progress than a fire or a car wreck. Though I understand this is ethically dubious, at best.