There has recently been a big brouhaha in Santa Rosa California because a 13-year-old boy was killed by a police officer when the boy refused to put down an AK-47. The weapon turned out to be a pellet gun. Hundreds of people have been demonstrating about this issue for several weeks. Most of the demonstrators are Marxists, Communists, Left-wingers and anarchists looking for the next new issue, but a few are just ignorant people. Ignorant at a stunning level.
It has never been wise to carry a fake firearm in public. And it has always been wise to drop what you are carrying anywhere when told to by an authoritative voice.
The issue is more critical today than it has ever been. I will explain why.
It is directly related to the title of this blog.
In any emergency situation where a person is faced with a significant threat, his body is filled with hormones specifically designed to compensate for the circumstances. These hormones, called the hormone cocktail by Rory Miller in his book Meditations on Violence, allow one to move very quickly, move deliberately when under pain, to ignore pain and to exert extraordinary physical energy. Simultaneously, it limits the focus of attention and vision to the emergency situation and can create a fight or flight panic.
Such an hormone cocktail occurs with police, law enforcement and military personnel on a regular basis.
Over the past two decades training has been focused on helping these personnel to act effectively and to avoid endangering themselves in potentially dangerous circumstances. Special training has been developed to put a person with a weapon under stress that stimulates the hormone cocktail and then requires the person to make quick life-saving judgments.
You probably have seen some of the training on TV and in movies. The person being trained is put in an environment with lots of loud noises and faced with pop-up targets that include very dangerous people along with innocent hostage victims.
The first thing the trainee must learn to do is to get out of the way of the threat. Get behind some protective object. You will notice that when two policemen stop a car one will get behind the door of the police car while the other approaches the car that has been stopped. Find physical protection first.
The second thing you'll notice is that people in dangerous situations fire immediately as soon as they detect a weapon or direct threat. The reason is simple. This is an important part of training.
A real threat, a criminal with a weapon, we'll shoot immediately without warning and kill the law enforcement or military person. That means the trainee must learn to offer no warning shots, that also means no firing to ‘disable’ the threat. It means shoot for the bulk of the body and kill the threat before he kills you. Your life is at stake.
With this kind of training, you do not want to be in any circumstance where you can be perceived by a professional law enforcement or a military person as a threat.
It is that simple. Don't wear a hoodie, don't carry anything that looks like a weapon. Don't look like a threat when you are in public. And tell that to children.