The first armed robbery attempt was in October, on a residential Bronx block near an elevated train stop. The victim fought back. He was shot in the leg.

The next came a month later and roughly a mile away. Once again, the victim resisted and was shot.

After the third robbery attempt, in February, two distinct patterns became apparent. The police suspected a single group was to blame, a group that cruised in cars and attacked lone men at night. But a more unusual pattern was seen among the three victims: when faced with a gun and a straightforward proposition — your money or your life — they had opted to take their chances with their lives.

“Being held at gunpoint, for some people, is not that scary,” said Brian Melford, 21, a Bronx youth activist and student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Around here, people think they’re strong. They just say, ‘I’m not going to give it up.’ ”

Criminologists have for decades studied the responses of victims to violent crime. Robberies in particular became a topic of scholarly research in the 1980s and 1990s, as random street crime spread through urban areas, with those studies mostly confirming the obvious: if you resist a robber, you are more likely to get hurt or, possibly, killed.