Audie M would have been proud!
I was probably 16YO, back in the 1960's when My cousin and I camped out on an old Ventura Hills ranch in CA. If you ever watch old Hollywood cowboy movies from the 1930's and see a modest ranch house, with a veranda, in a dry valley, a single barn and skinny rail fence,, that's where I was. So we walked out to this abandoned ranch house to spend the night, we had a BSA 177 cal air rifle, like boys mostly carry, and a tin of 177 ammo.
We were only a dozen miles from the I-5 Freeway but back then, that place was remote!
We moved into the old barn and started to cook our can of beany weanys when in the distance we heard motorcycles. Normaly that was not unusuall but it was past 10PM in Febuary, very dark and cold even in CA.
Well it became apparent that the bikes were dirt bikes piloted by 'Tough Kids' looking to make themselves feel big, intimidate the footbound likes of me and my cousin who was sorta frail. They tooled around the ranch house and barn hurling insults (how they knew there were no adults around is a mystery, maybe because there were no cars, maybe they tracked us) then withdrew, it was obvious to any dirt-wise kid that they were waiting in the darkness.
I climbed up into the hay loft, I had the air rifle. I guess the toughs did not have a firearm, they never shot back. The kids had no noise disipline, no light disipline, but they did not with draw back, past my effective fire range. Latter I built a fire in the barn yard and dared em to come and get me. I knew that the fire would destroy thier night vision and snuck out through the shadows and came-up behind them. Like I said they did not have a fire arm, and I had a BSA air rifle.
A few years later I joined the US Army, I lost track of my cousin until the late 1990's. He, raised by a HOLLYWOOD single mother, was a complete mess, a basket case, raised on designer drugs instead of a solid family. Yeah, he had married an 'artist',,, a very SICK artist! They had beutiful children yearning for a stable family,,breaks my heart. Anyway, he told me then that I had sent a few of the Toughs to the hospital, seems they had never suffered an injury and the reality of the situation had unnerved them. My heart bleeds to this day.
Outside of that I have nevered harmed any person in any way because I am a pacificist.