Celebrate National Preparedness Month with Refuse To Be A Victim

When was the last time you took stock of your personal safety strategy? Do you even have a personal safety strategy? Learning to recognize and deal with with unsafe situations doesn't take as much as work as you might think and it could save your life or those of the people you love. And wouldn't you know it... September is National Preparedness Month!

So what can you do?

Attend a Refuse To Be A Victim seminar in your area. Going strong for more than 20 years, Refuse To Be A Victim is the NRA’s crime prevention and personal safety program that emphasizes the single most important step toward ensuring your personal safety: knowing how to handle potentially dangerous situations ahead of time.

The government agrees; from Ready.gov: “This year we are asking you to take action now—make a plan with your community, your family, and for your pets. Plan how to stay safe and communicate during the disasters that can affect your community.” While Ready.gov focuses on emergencies such as floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and power outages, Refuse To Be A Victim can help you plan and prepare for other areas of your life. 

Do you know what you would do if someone broke into your house while you were home, or came up to you on the street and demanded your wallet? Having a plan and practicing this plan with your family often means you won’t have to waste valuable seconds deciding what to do should any of these situations occur; these saved seconds could mean the difference between life and death.

Refuse To Be A Victim encourages you to have a personal safety strategy in place before you need it. You stand a much better chance of preventing an attack if you make yourself difficult to prey on—this holds true for violent attacks, cyber attacks, attacks on your personal property, etc. Knowing that criminals prefer easy targets, Refuse To Be A Victim provides common-sense tactics that you can easily integrate into your everyday life to create layers of safety around yourself, your loved ones, and your belongings. There is no no-size-fits-all plan for everyone, and Refuse To Be A Victim provides hundreds of tips and techniques so that each person can decide which ones fit into his or her personal safety plan.  

Here's some tips you'll learn in a class that are easy to learn and could make all the difference:

• When going out of town, prepare your house so it doesn’t look unoccupied.  Put a hold on your mail, put interior and exterior lights on timers to create the illusion of occupancy, and ask a neighbor to occasionally park in your driveway.  Criminals want to get in and out quickly and quietly and a vacant house is a perfect opportunity for them.
  
  
• Be prepared for what to do if someone breaks into your house while you’re there.  Have a designated “safe room” with extra locks on the door, a charged cell phone, and personal protection devices of your choice.  Discuss this with your family and practice so everyone knows their job: have one person grab the children; another person call 911; etc.
  
  
• If you are out with the family, be prepared in case one of your children gets lost.  Take a picture of them at the beginning of the day so you know exactly what they’re wearing and can give a good description to the police.  Talk with your children ahead of time about how they should approach a family if they get lost as opposed to a single man or women.