[OldMarksman]

It's not "the stakes" at the exclusion of the odds.

Of course it's not. It's a balance among the likelihood, potential consequences, and the cost of mitigation. One will choose to accept a risk if the odds are sufficiently low and mitigation is impractical even if the potential consequences are very severe. On the other hand, if mitigation is no big deal, one would choose to mitigate rather than accept the risk. That's why the sale of smoke detectors and fire extinguishers is not uncommon.

Different people may well make different decisions even with the same analysis.

Some people stash survival rations to use in the event of a natural disaster. I do not. Some people have two way radios. I do not. I do keep extra medicines and a first aid kit on hand.

Here's a case in point: having a means for a space flight crew to escape a booster failure is extremely expensive, both from the standpoint of development cost and the payload weight capacity that is sacrificed, and the likelihood of ever needing it is very low. There was a crew escape system on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecrafts, but no booster ever exploded. The Shuttle didn't have one, but the new Orion (which is on the chopping block) does. The Astronauts insist on it.

I don't buy the argument that the reason that no one can come up with ONE SINGLE INCIDENT is because the events are not tracked. Look at the number of posts on these forums. Look at the number of people. Look at the unbelievable amount of esoteric knowledge. Yet, no one can name a single event. None. Zero.

You are, of course, entirely correct. My point, albeit poorly stated, was that one cannot find sufficient reliable data for meaningful analysis.

Why no examples at all? Consider this: if I had been involved in a shooting and had not yet been acquitted in a criminal trial court in a jurisdiction in which said acquittal protects me very strongly from a civil tort case, I would not be saying anything at all about the incident, much less posting anything. Nor should anyone else.

It's NOT because the events are recorded and reported. It's because it doesn't happen.

That is of course a possibility, but I doubt it, and it is impossible to prove a negative.

Without being specific, I know of careers and lives that were ruined because someone made a bad decision on the basis that no one could "document a single incident in which someone had [won't go into detail here]."

Know what? It can happen again. A few more of us now know of one incident, but no one else is going to be able to find out about it.

I agree that I'm pretty much SOL if a multiple assailant, multi-shots per assailant situation ever comes up. However, I'm also SOL if there's a nuclear war instigated by rogue AI computers.... and I consider the odds to be about the same.

The odds of your being attacked are very slim, but I'd put them a lot higher than those of a nuclear war. If you are attacked, however, the likelihood that the perp may have an accomplice may be enough to worry about. Most importantly, from what I've been able to learn, the likelihood of one hit (much less one shot) effecting an immediate stop are apparently rather low.

I would hope to be able to stop one attacker, and maybe two, should that terrible eventuality ever occur, and I would not expect to necessarily do so with one shot per assailant.

Since what we carry are not all that different, and since you are skilled, do you think I'm overly optimistic?