Safety Dance

When an emergency… uh… emerges, your mace won’t do you any good at the bottom of a handbag. Time is of the essence, and you’ve been known to rummage in there for three minutes looking (juicy-)fruitlessly for gum. Then again, most of us don’t want to go through life poised over a doomsday button or clutching a deadman’s switch.

To be effective, personal safety devices have to be close to hand and easy to deploy. But they also have to be conveniently out of the way. After all, you hope seldom (or never) to use them. This is the balance that must be struck in a world where, hopefully, we aren’t under immediate threat most of the time.

Like, what’s the most comfortable way to carry bear spray? In an interior pocket of your backpack? Or in a quick-draw holster right under your chin, lashed to the sternum strap? Depends on whether a grizzly is charging you at the moment you’re being asked, I guess. Maybe there’s a middle option.

Meanwhile, just as it’s dangerous to keep your personal and property protection devices outside easy reach, there’s also a downside to maintaining them in too ready a state. Consider hair-trigger car alarms, wailing away on every street in America, alerting the neighbors not so often to auto thieves as to wandering cats, gentle zephyrs, and subtle changes in lighting conditions. Their effectiveness is compromised by their overactivity. They’re like Æsop’s Boy Who Cried
Whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop whoop BEWBEWBEWBEWBEWBEWBEWBEWBEW booo-DEEE-booo-DEEE-booo-DEEE-booo-DEEE-booo-DEEE-booo-DEEE whooooOOOOOOP whooooOOOOOOP whooooOOOOOOP whooooOOOOOOP

And that’s just a loud, irritating sound. Some of the implements we use for personal protection play with considerably higher stakes. If you’re tryna protect your home with lethal force, it’s worth assessing the trade-off between 1: quick accessibility when you’re awakened by the sound of breaking glass, and 2: safe storage the rest of the time. (Which, again, one hopes is almost always.)

Anyway, here’s a couple models of MyGuard Clip wearable alarms a-walkin’ that fine line between readiness in a crisis and convenience the rest of the time. One’s got an LED safety light and the other has a phone holder, so they both serve some purpose even when the alarm is not needed.

Watch this video from our MorningSave partners — they talk about these MyGuard products from :18 to about 1:30.

As far as scaremongering TV segments go, this one’s a pretty chilling presentation, right? I mean, not everyone becomes the victim of a violent crime, but as Chris Hansen’s Shatnerfication starkly shows, time mercilessly pursues us all. Brrr.