It's all good to say fight back, which is fine when you're talking about one assailant, but most of the time these guys are working in 2s, 3s, or more. Once you've got that many people on you, and you don't know what they may be carrying, you're screwed. You're always better handing off everything you can -- material goods are not worth as much as say, your fingers (cutting off fingers seems to be the trendy assault as of late).
If someone were actually trying to take me off somewhere believe me I'd fight. A punch or hit to the Adam's apple also gives you time, follow it up with an eye-gouge so that you can get away. The key to our garage is a long screw-like thing -- I always carry it in my dominant hand, it would do some damage. If you don't have keys, a pen. Women that have never taken a self-defense course really should, there's a lot of ways to defend yourself that you should know well enough that they are instinctual (ie how to get out of a basic hold).
All much easier to say when you are thinking that it is just one guy and no gun. Once you're talking multiple guys and weapons, it's a much more complicated situation.
When my husband was held up a couple of months ago, it was 3 guys, 3 guns -- one on him, one on my suegra, and one on our 2 year old niece. He gave everything up, the scariest part of the whole situation was not knowing if they were going to take the child once they had everything else. Fortunately they just took the wallet, phones, car etc. Then they used his car to assault another family, took their car too, and then they took those two cars and assaulted another guy on a motorcycle. All three guys filed reports --- did the police do anything? No.
