*Slate *reports that witnesses to the Trayvon Martin incident heard shots and “The two women raced over to their patio and went outside.”
When I hear shots I do not race to the patio and go outside.
Do you think that Slate is lying? That the witnesses are lying? (and if so, why?)
Do you think that everyone reacts the same as you in certain situations?
The last time I was at home and heard shots, I ran outside. Guess I’m weird.
Same here. Cautiously, but I went outside and peeked around the building in the direction I heard the shots.
Yep. Heard shots outside, ran to my window to see what was going on, and only after a few seconds did I think, “Shit, I should get the fuck down!”
How often do you hear shots?
Might I suggest that if you are used to hearing shots – say, for example, that you live near a hotly disputed drug corner – you probably do get down. But if you live in a gated community and you never hear shots, I suggest that you might well do exactly as they said.
And as you were standing on your patio, looking around and saying, “Were those SHOTS??” you might only then think to yourself, “Um… this is kind of stupid.”
If I wouldn’t do it, than nobody would do it.
If a building was on fire, I wouldn’t run into it. Therefore, there are no firemen anywhere. That’s just crazy talk.
When I moved to the Midwest, the first time I hear a tornado siren I ran outside to look for the tornado. After that, I just ignored them.
That’s exactly what I did! Only it was in my dream last night, and as I rode along in the tornado, hovering a few feet off the ground, I realized it was pretty stupid.
Seconding Bricker. I live in a quietly crime-free suburb. One evening last fall, there was apparently a man waving a gun in the parking lot of an apartment complex down the street, and literally nine or ten local police cars went racing by. Of course, all of us neighbors came streaming out of our houses and clustered in a crowd behind the police cars to see what was going on.
Frankly, given the small nature of the incident and the otherwise quiet nature of this area, I suspect that several of the police were essentially doing the same thing we were.
I’ve only heard shots once in my life, and I didn’t know that’s what it was.
I was living in Brooklyn a couple floors above a bodega. It was robbed at gunpoint one night, and the owner was shot and killed. It had been a windy night and when I heard what I later learned were gunshots, I remembered thinking it sounded like a big Rubbermaid trashcan had been dropped and bounced a couple times. What the hell did my suburban-raised ass know from a gunshot?
I really felt bad for the guy- I saw him in there every day. I had just had a minor argument with him that night- I went in to buy a six pack; got it off the shelf in the fridge and he put it in a plastic bag for me. When I got upstairs, I took the six pack out of the bag and the bottom of it fell apart and six bottles of beer fell to my floor, and three of them broke. I went back down to complain, because they always re-use the six pack holders, and obviously this one was old enough that the glue had dissolved or something, and the whole thing was no longer strong enough to hold the bottles.
Then a couple hours later he was dead. 
No, no and no. It is Mundane and Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS)
I did spend a lot of my youth near quail hunting country so gun shots echoing around were sometimes common. In the neighborhood where I live now I am a bit surprised that I do not hear gunshots as a lot of domestic violence noises are heard frequently. My most interesting neighbor, whom I have never seen, is often heard throwing boyfriends out of her house with screams of “Go fuck yourself! I’m going to go fuck myself!”
When I lived in Adams Morgan in DC, I heard shots so often that I was hardly aware of them. I was on the phone with my sister once, and she heard shots through the phone, and interrupted me to ask what that was. I had to kind of replay the last 30 seconds in my head and said, “I guess a couple of gunshots” and then went on chatting.
Yeah, I don’t really react to shots at all. It comes from living in Baghdad, Kabul, Kosovo, and DC. You have to be pretty close before I pay much attention. Same with car bombs.
Car bombs, I would probably notice.
The headline for the article says of the witnesses, “They saw it”. Completely misleading. They didn’t see “it”, they saw the aftermath. Sloppy journalism, at best.
You’d be surprised, in Baghdad in 2006 hardly a day went by with out at least one big explosion and many days had lots and lots. We lived out in the city and one time we went in for a meeting at the embassy, there was an explosion off in the distance and all the embassy people went under the desk and all of us field people were like “wtf?” that was no where near the embassy. We get back to our guesthouse in the city and it turned out it was close enough to where we lived to blow out some windows in our bedrooms.
ETA: One time they hit an ammo dump and all night long there were explosions near our guesthouse. I remember posting about it here in real time. Eventually, we just went to sleep and tried to ignore them.