It didn’t make a lot of headlines here in the United States, but there was a knife attack in Australia yesterday. While experts say it wasn’t a terrorist attack, the suspect apparently had a lot of jihadist material on a USB drive and may have yelled “Allah Ackbar” prior to his attack.

But nope, not terrorism, apparently.

Regardless, part of the reason we didn’t hear much about it was that it wasn’t as bad an attack as it could have been. Part of that is because rather than running in panic, a bunch of Aussies and a couple of Brits in the area chased the man down.

Aussies and Brits – including some young men from Manchester – chased the stabber through the streets of Sydney’s CBD. The footage is stirring: they surround him and follow him, determined to prevent him from stabbing any more people.

Eventually they caught him and, armed with little more than a wicker chair and a crate, they pinned him to the ground, in a makeshift mini-prison, until the cops came.

Just witnessed incredible bravery from members of the public and ⁦@FRNSW⁩ officers chasing down a man on a stabbing rampage in Sydney’s CBD. He is now under arrest. ⁦@7NewsSydney⁩ pic.twitter.com/wNKatejHVp

— Andrew Denney (@Andrew_Denney) August 13, 2019

These people are heroes. They took great personal risks in the name of protecting the people of Sydney.

In their minds, this was a terrorist. His words suggested as much. His knife-waving gave further evidence to his extremist fervour.

And yet they didn’t do what people are advised to do in a terror attack: ‘run and hide’. They did the opposite: ran towards the terrorist, as he will have seemed to them, in order to overpower and neutralise him.

Luckily, these young men are being celebrated. Memes are becoming common, apparently, and someone even started tweeting “Make Australia Crate Again.”

I love it.

These men should be celebrated. They should be honored. They stood down a terrorist who was armed when they weren’t.

However, I also hate that their country puts them in that kind of danger. After all, terrorism is a thing, and Australia isn’t immune to it. These brave souls could have found themselves facing someone armed with something more than a knife and they’d have had no means to defend themselves because Australian lawmakers are terrified of an armed populace.

There’s also a lesson here for all of us. Those who commit these kinds of attacks, be they armed with a gun or a knife, tend to fold at the first sign of resistance. They’re cowards most of the time, losers who want desperately to feel power over others. The moment they find out that someone won’t accept them being the most powerful one in the room, the shut down.

This is why it’s imperative to carry everywhere you can, so you can be the one to stop those people from being the most powerful one there.

These men in Sydney were more powerful because they had numbers. There were enough of them to stop the knife-wielding attacker. The question is, though, what would have happened if there hadn’t been superior numbers?

Don’t you count on those numbers working in your favor. Carry, train, and be ready.