Once in a while, not very often, journalists receive death threats. Some, particularly middle class ones brought up in comfy suburbs and educated at a "better type" of school, don't treat them seriously and are taken by surprise when they gunned down on their front door step one evening. Life was cheaper where I came from, and I could easily believe that some of the people issuing the threats, the drug dealers for instance, might be serious. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time was enough to get a person killed there, never mind actually making life more difficult for the criminal by putting them in the paper.  So, when I was threatened I would say to the guy making the threat, it was always a guy, that he'd better kill me now. That was because the very next thing I planned to do was make a phone call and get their name put on the list of people who would have a very short life expectancy should anything happen to me. As a journalist, the chances were, I knew a lot more about them than they knew about me. This was not the response the thugs expected and was said with such confidence that, well, if I'm writing this then none of them followed through on the threat. I heard a story a while back about a gangster here in Edmonton, Canada, who was making threats against a Scottish guy. He woke in the early hours of one morning to find three or four visitors from the United Kingdom in his bedroom. One was pushing the barrel of a pistol between the thug's teeth. That was probably what woke him up. They suggested he moderate his behaviour and stop threatening people. He took the hint. 'Least that's how the story goes. As it was told to me. I've always wondered where the gun came from.