Always use your biggest weapon. If you've got a rifle and a pistol, your rifle is your primary choice until it runs dry or malfunctions.
If you've got a pintle mounted M240 and a carbine, you run the belts out before you reach for your carbine.
If you're behind the wheel and you're faced with a threat, you fight your way out with the biggest weapon at your disposal, which is almost certainly 1500-odd kilograms of metal moving as fast as you can control it.
My mother is visiting.
She and my wife went down to the store to pick up some cake pans, after I wrongly insisted that we did in fact have a perfectly serviceable 13x9" pan.
When they walked back in, my wife was sobbing, and my mother was trying to console her while juggling cake pans and the keys to the front door: locks and keys with which she is understandably unfamiliar.
Making the final turn onto our block, they were stopped by a roadblock of sorts. An SUV with tinted windows stopped right in the center of the road, taking up more of the narrow street than was possible to navigate around, and four of the plentiful wannabe-thugs that take up space in this neighborhood. They typically have nothing better to do than stoop it all day, and occasionally scream at each other, or jaywalk in front of traffic without looking, or flag down pedestrians to ask for cigarettes, quarters, or a sip of that 40.
Except the wannabes weren't on their usual stoop - they were blocking the road, chatting with whoever was in the SUV. So my mother, a fairly savvy lady and a veteran of rough neighborhoods, assumed it was a drug deal in progress, and told my wife to stop short.
And that's when one of the thugs looked them dead in the face, pointed with one hand, and pulled out a gun with the other.
HA HA, a funny joke! You see? It's just a realistic replica, with a thin sliver of orange over the barrel, almost completely hidden by the slide. I'm familiar with these kinds of Airsoft guns. Technically illegal to import, as they do not meet the letter of the law for markings on toy guns. Imported by the hundreds of thousands, and not high on the enforcement list.
Just a funny joke to play on the people we're blocking in on a sidestreet.
And all I can think is that had it been me in the driver's seat, there would almost certainly be a dead kid with a fake gun and real tire treads.