Paul touched it, but he didn’t grip it and stroke it as well as he might have. Military training is “Rush an ambush.” If you lay low you’ll be picked off at leisure, and if you run you’re likely to run into a purpose-built boobytrap zone. Your only hope for survival is to rush the ambush and stop the guns. Some of you will be shot, but they can’t get all of you before you’re on top of them. It’s a devilishly tricky instinct to train into folks whose minds are open to combat. It’d be pretty hard to train into students or even reasonably fit 25 year olds.
Yes I have been shot at more than once and I have been involved in 4 armed robberies in my life. No shots were fired. I was shot at in my front yard less than a year ago. I was chased my an angry ex boyfriend once who put a few bullet holes in my car and a guy popped off a few rounds at me after he murdered his girlfriend on the sidewalk in front of a bar, I was with her sister standing right next to her. I started moving away as soon as I saw the gun because I had no idea who he was or what he was going to do with it. Maybe he thought I was with her I have no idea. He left the scene and killed himself down the street from the bar.
“I’d’ve rushed the shooter and been okay” is a lie we tell ourselves to come up with a reason why some horrible random thing that happened to someone else couldn’t happen to us. It’s a defense mechanism.
A young black man rushed the shooter in a recent shooting and was credited with saving several lives. His answer was that he was only trying to save his own life when he rushed the shooter.
Rather than developing strategies to rush gunmen, I think your first plan should be to leave Yemen as soon as possible.
Sure, and I am glad that worked out for him. I’m not even saying it’s a bad idea. But when people who weren’t there declare assume that the people there are dead because they didn’t have good judgment/lacked courage and that they, themselves, would have been faster/smarter/braver, that’s hubris. Just because there was an opportunity to rush a shooter once (in that case, from a bathroom) doesn’t mean that there always is, nor that it’s always the best plan.
I don’t know if it’s as much a defense mechanism as it is an Internet Tough Guy or Armchair Quarterback thing. People will always say how they would’ve or could’ve done something different and better, that’s not hard to do from the comfort of your own home and behind a computer monitor.
It’s not that different than proclaiming that a cop did something incorrect when he fired his gun. It’s easy to say that he should’ve waited for the bad guy to shoot first when you’re not now or ever going to be in that situation.
A 1998, pre-Columbine school shooting in Springfield, OR was similarly stopped when a wounded student recognized that the shooter was reloading and he tackled him. The shooter pulled a pistol and shot the hero again, but fortunately not fatally.
Not even during a reload is rushing “safe.”
Tom Jones is a cop?
There’s an excellent chance that you’ll die anyway, even if all you’re doing is cowering in fear. So why not do the one thing that MIGHT work?
Speaking as someone who has been shot (though by accident): If you get shot during the rush, you are incredibly unlikely to finish the rush on momentum. It is, at best, shocking, painful, and disorienting, and you will probably fall down. Try sprinting with someone randomly hitting you with an electrified hammer.
Speaking as someone who has had some training from the school of a guy (Dan Inosanto) who did demonstrations of rushing armed officers with a knife for the LAPD: If you start your rush from 30 feet or more, you will probably get shot. And fall down.
If you’re fit, fast, and prepared, and the person with the gun isn’t ready or has their attention focused elsewhere, 20 feet is about where it starts to get plausible, but it’s still extremely risky and a last-resort proposition.
If you’re 2 feet behind them, they don’t know you’re there, and you happen to have a cinder block in your hand, by all means, go for it. Otherwise, trying to take down the shooter should only come into play if all other survival options are cut off, when you’re cornered and have no hiding places, and fully expect to be killed. It is a last-resort gambit.
Another thing to be aware of is that these things happen a lot faster than you can imagine.
Here’s the video of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station. Starting counting from the time you see the brown hat coming at Oswald (and remember, Oswald was surrounded by cops!)
Watch the Secret Service agents in the video where Jon Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan. They were about as fast as human beings can react, but Hinckley still managed to get six shots off in less than two seconds, and Hinckley was shooting a REVOLVER.
In my own hometown, an angry citizen charged into City Hall and started shooting. He kept shooting even while one of the bystanders was throwing chairs at him.
Sirhan Sirhan kept shooting even after three people had brought him to the ground.
I’m going to challenge the idea that you can go 30 feet in 2 seconds.
If you’re in starting blocks pointing the right direction, tensed and waiting for a starter’s pistol, sure you can make it that far in under 2 seconds. In a random direction, taking the time to figure out where exactly the gunshot is coming from, dropping whatever you’re holding, turning, starting from a standing position… no fucking way.
But it’s not “the one thing” that might work. Running from a shooter and hiding from a shooter have much better survival rates than tackling a shooter.
Yes, tackling a shooter is the one thing that might actually neutralize the shooter. But if what we want is to maximize the survival rate among the shooter’s potential victims, what we should be telling them (and what actual shooter-response training by people who know what they’re talking about does tell them, as Machine Elf pointed out) is to get the hell out of Dodge.
ISTM that not tackling a shooter is likely to cause many years of “I wish I had intervened” regret and re-enactment in one’s mind afterwards.
Sure, maybe you could charge the shooter, get shot, and then regret not having hid and stayed safe. But not tackling can lead to severe regret.
That being said, if there is more than one shooter, then you are screwed if you tackle one of them and the other gunman comes by to help his buddy out.
I don’t think it’s “2 seconds” as much as it is that theory (though proven) that if you are more than 21 feet away from someone with a gun, you can’t get to them before they can shoot you.
I know in some states, if you shoot someone from more that is more than 21 feet from you, it’ll be argued that you could have run away/run for cover and therefore it’s murder. For example, if someone was 100 yards away and coming after you with a knife, you’d certainly have time to run.
Anyways, one part of that works on the assumption that someone can move 21 feet in 1.5 seconds. It would seem that the same person could also go 30 feet in 2 seconds.
There’s exceedingly few scenarios where one option gets me shot and the other one doesn’t that I’d have to put any real thought into it.
You make it sound like getting shot just hurts, with no other consequences and a person should just be brave and take that pain while they play the part of the hero.
In addition to the severe pain, getting shot also makes you far less likely to be able to finish doing whatever you were trying to do. This is, of course, one of the big reasons people shoot other people with guns - to stop them from doing whatever they were doing. If you get shot, you’re probably not going to be able to finish neutralizing the gunman.
Getting shot also makes you far more likely to die. This is the second big reason people shoot other people. If you get shot - especially after having just antagonized the shooter, such that he’s motivated to shoot you again - you’re probably not going home.
So if my choices are:
-a year of therapy to cope with “what if I had intervened instead”
OR
-probably getting shot without disabling the shooter, and probably ending up dead
I’ll take the therapy.
This is irrelevant to the thread hypothetical. This is like someone asking, “What would be the best way to treat lung cancer if you get it?” and then being told, “Best way is not to smoke cigarettes.” The thread presumes that someone *does *have a gun and is shooting people; gun control is absolutely irrelevant by that point.
Dude, you sorta need to re-think your life style or living conditions. That seems like a exorbitant amount of bullets flying around you.