New Rules for Daily Behavior in a Shooting Gallery
- Do not wear brightly colored clothing out in public. Shooters tend to focus on the plumage. Also, avoid white at night and black in daylight.
- Do not go to large public gatherings. Shooters tend to be drawn to large public gatherings. This includes schools, supermarkets, restaurants, big box stores, movie theaters, concerts, festivals, marches, rallies, sporting events, races….or any other advertised event. If you know about it, the shooter knows about it.
- If gunfire breaks out, do not run for cover. Running attracts the shooter’s attention. Drop down and play dead. Shooters don’t shoot dead people, so pretend you’re dead. Don’t move or you really could end up dead.
- If armed, do not attempt to return rifle fire. Your handgun is only effective up to around 100 feet but you’re probably not good for more than 25 feet. The shooter can reach out and touch you from a hundred yards or more. In the meantime, you are turning yourself into a prime target, along with the people around you. (So much for the good guy with a gun.)
- Do not attempt to hide behind car doors. Rifle bullets go right through them. Put the entire vehicle between you and the shooter, then hit the ground and stay down. Behind the tires if can manage it.
- Do not go looking for friends and loved ones until the shooting is over. Stay down and hope they do the same.
- If you’re shot or someone else is, stop the bleeding with pressure, front and back.
- Don’t bother to call 911. They already know all about it. It’s a waste of your time.
- Never stand near famous people. Ask Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak. Well, no, you can’t because he was murdered by Giuseppe Zangara simply because he was standing next to president-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (Well, actually, it was a botched medical procedure that finally killed Cermack.
- When it is all over, make sure you file suit against the company that made the rifle, the store that sold it, ditto for the ammunition. You won’t win, but you will feel better because you have done something.
NOTE: These rules apply only to long-range rifle shooters. Short-range rifle shooters and pistol shooters require a different tactic. Everyone should start jumping up and down, while screaming and waving their hands aggressively. This will confuse the shit out of the shooter. Then attack the mother fucker and beat him to death. Some of you will die but others will leave alive because of what you do. collectively, did.
07/05/2022 @ 5:09 pm
I generally agree with most of your items listed above, but I am curious about one of them. I guess it is more accurate to say that I disagree with it. That item is, number 8, “don’t call 911.” I can recall specific situations where, as a police officer, I would instruct someone to call 911. How is it that you figure that “they already know”? Where does that idea come from?
I’ll add to that that my training says, not only can it be helpful to instruct someone to call 911, but also the tactic is to give a specific person specific intrusions to call 911…as in…’you, call 911’. When not given specific instructions, people tend to stand around, or assume that someone else is doing so. Granted, emergency situations can vary widely, but telling someone that 911 is a waste of time seems dangerous. Where does that idea come from?
07/05/2022 @ 5:21 pm
I will agree with your critique….but this was written in response to the Highland Park shooting, and there were officers all along the parade route. I generalized from a specific instance. The other concern is that in an active shooting situation, you want people to be alert to the threat, not talking into a telephone. The key point was about playing dead instead of running for cover, as if you can outrun a .223. My Israeli instructors stressed that over and over again when I was in their security training course, that it was better to play dead than to be dead. And I used to be good enough with a pistol to hit my marks at a 100 yards but those days are long gone now. I probably couldn’t even see the shooter, let alone hit him. Appreciate the comment.
07/05/2022 @ 6:02 pm
I agree with all the rest of it. And in the moment of deciding whether to play dead or run, they most likely wont call 911.
As for parades and such, we have pretty much ruled those out. Our theater season is about to begin again, and I am thinking carefully about that. “Hamilton” is coming back this year…the reason of the season may get sold back.
07/07/2022 @ 9:30 am
I am mostly crowd averse.
It’s not an absolute rule but it factors in more often than not. Living in a small town now vs. the crumbling city (Portland Or.) I lived in for 65+ years has made a difference. We’ve had a couple of those 2nd Amendment gatherings full of misguided types with big trucks and altered flags who come from neighboring areas. I avoid such.
The criticism I have of the suggestions are in line with Bitey’s, and it sounds like I choose the wrong wardrobe on many occasions.
The playing dead part is probably good advice but maybe doesn’t jibe with my DNA. I’ve broken up fights that I should have stayed away from, even taking on 5 bikers who I saw pummeling a mentally challenged fellow. They were no match for my fury and pick-up truck with a driver’s door used as a battering ram.
I still don’t know if that was idiotic or heroic.
07/07/2022 @ 10:41 am
I avoid crowds, demonstrations, rallies, concerts, and other public gatherings, but not because I am afraid of being shot. I just don’t like crowds…or people, for that matter. I can go a week at a time without actually seeing anyone other than Satya, and I am fine with that. Okay, truth: I’m severely paranoid, always have been.
07/07/2022 @ 12:01 pm
That’s interesting, AWS. That reminds me of my very first arrest. An 18 year old kid had stolen a wallet from an older man on Santa Monica Blvd. The kid was taunting the old man by waving it at him while he skipped away from him backwards. Some guy driving a van saw this happening, and drove up on the sidewalk and knocked the kid down with the driver side door.
As for crowds, I am both fascinated by them and rather newly afraid of them. I love big cities, and I love quiet isolation. My recent fear of crowds basically revolves around the social unrest that we have all become familiar with lately. It is not so much the marches or protests, but rather the lone loon with an AR-15 trying to become famous, or the lone cop who assumes that if I am driving at night, I must be on my way from stealing the car, and on the way toward raping someone. I can’t get past the idea that I don’t recognize my country anymore.
07/07/2022 @ 1:42 pm
It’s all about the media. Bad things happen every day but, until the advent of social media, people in Boston very rarely heard of the atrocities taking place in San Francisco, and San Franciscans were just as ignorant about tragedies in Boston. Every now and then, an especially tragic story would travel from coast to coast but, until the internet happened, we were more likely to know about tragedies on the other side of the world than we knew about goings-on in America.
It’s the megaphone effect, the focus of the lens that blurs out the nuances of reality.
07/07/2022 @ 2:19 pm
While I agree that media an social media present certain challenges to the public peace, I believe that their positive effects outweigh the negatives. For example, we elected a legitimate authoritarian white nationalist as president in 2016. Media fascinated with the circus atmosphere of his campaign contributed to that. However, making the public aware that he is a white nationalist, and threatens the liberty of people like me is not just the megaphone effect making him a racist populist. He actually was and is a racist nationalist. They actually are doing voter suppression against counties with majority minority voters. A white nationalist mob did actually march on Charlottesville Virginia shouting antisemitic slogans. Virginia actually elected a governor appealing to some of those voters. A kid with a rifle actually went into a grocery store and shot Black people because they were Black, and guided by the ideas shared by that mob in Virginia, its governor, and the former president. This is not amplified sound that we are experiencing. We are experiencing an angry, militant white minority, trying to spark a race war.
07/07/2022 @ 2:26 pm
It absolutely is amplified sound. Back in the day, when we were a more literate people than we are today, people were recruited with slanted media. Mein Kampf was written for that specific purpose…to be a recruiting tool. Today, largely through YouTube, but also through other social media outlets, rabble-rousers are connecting with recruits they would never have been able to reach through traditional mass media. The immediacy of audio-visual presentations does two things: it talks around the literacy barrier and it is readily absorbed without critical appraisal.
07/07/2022 @ 5:32 pm
Critical appraisal is precisely what’s missing over and over
07/07/2022 @ 11:36 pm
I agree with your appraisal of my appraisal
07/07/2022 @ 8:59 pm
“Back in the day, when we were a more literate people than we are today…”
Alan, just exactly what day of the week in what year was that?
Trump has given a louder voice to the racism and bigotry borne of the ignorance and illiteracy which has been seething beneath a very thin veneer of civility and social amenity for decades if not centuries.
In fact, in far too many instances, it has been the literate hypocrites, enlightened demagogues, and well educated political opportunists who have perpetrated and perpetuated the social ills we struggle and grapple with on a day to day basis, including the mass shootings your ‘rules’ ostensibly address.
07/07/2022 @ 11:36 pm
It was on October 12, 1972, which fell on a Thursday. I remember it well because it was my birthday.
07/07/2022 @ 11:39 pm
Statistics lie, but currently a number of sources are reporting that more than 50% of the electorate reads at somewhere between a fourth and an eighth grade level. It is very hard to get reliable statistics on this issue, but I believe that more Americans are less able to read critically than ever before because critical reading isn’t taught in the eighth grade. It’s taught in the ninth grade.
07/08/2022 @ 7:02 am
The average reading level in this country has hovered around 6th grade for decades.
Critical reading isn’t taught at all because critical thinking isn’t promoted as a necessary element or a fundamental component of a free public education…
If people here were able to read and think critically, there would be no ability or opportunity for Trump, or anyone else, to successfully exploit the ignorance of nearly half of the voting public to the degree and extent of the development of a mindless cult and the inception of something called ‘Trumpism’.
Too many young people are entering colleges and universities with their heads full of misinformation, disinformation, and lies absorbed as a result of overexposure to deleterious social media and pseudo intellectual bullshit on the internet. So much
that a significant amount of time and resources are expended unraveling and debunking what could only be characterized as intellectual garbage and raw mental sewerage…
07/08/2022 @ 12:00 pm
No one actually knows what the average reading level of the American electorate is because there are no national benchmarks, despite attempts to create one through federal legislation.
The statistics are actually meaningless because 99% of Americans (supposedly) can read and write…because if you can’t read and write by the fourth grade (when we went to school) you were shunted into a remedial reading program. (I know this because I was in one. They thought I was retarded for a while because I didn’t talk much. When someone finally asked me why I didn’t I said, “I don’t have very much to say.” I’ve changed since then.)
So, what we are really talking about here isn’t the ability to read. We are really talking about compreand hension, understanding what you are reading.
The ability or inability to read is controlled by both heredity and instructional methodologies. There was nothing inherently wrong with me that some better teachers teaching from a better curriculum couldn’t cure (evidenced by the fact that it obviously worked in my case but I remember one kid in my remedial reading class who couldn’t get it and was judged as mentally retarded, something all of us kids knew, which was why we shunned him. We were kids.)
When we talk about grade-level reading scores, we are really addressing comprehension, and comprehension is affected by political considerations that have infiltrated the classroom, which is why they are banning books, and trying to rewrite curricula.
There is another factor affecting comprehension: the shift from a literate culture to an auditory culture. Today, people who cannot or don’t like to read obtain most of their information from audio-visual presentations – television, radio, film, and youtube videos, ticktok, instagram.
Twitter and Facebook are hostile to long-winded posts like this one because they distract users from the advertisers. Longer posts on Facebook do not get read…and Facebook itself has been experimenting with modifications that make it increasingly difficult to write longer posts. Twitter increased the limits on posts from 140 to 280 characters in 2017.
However, the conclusion that Americans are unable to think critically is simply not true. The idiots on the right are idiots, but they are thinking critically about what we’re trying to tell them…but they are not buying what we are selling. Their critical appraisals bring them to a different set of conclusions from those that you and I subscribe to…and, yes, they are wrong, but they came to their conclusions by viewing the data through the colored glasses that their parents and the media moguls have provided for them.
They ain’t stupid. They just aren’t afraid to be the bigots they were raised to be.
07/08/2022 @ 7:45 am
These things that R.P. has pointed to have very interesting historical events which provide good test cases for the sociological concepts involved. The creation of Gutenberg’s machine, and the Protestant Reformation were events that involved the flowering of literacy, and to a great degree, critical thinking. Taking any set of concepts, even religious dogma, and making analyses, and reconstructing them based upon a relevant local perspective, led to strenuous mental/intellectual habits and development. At the same time, the creation of the new led to the buttressing of the newly orthodox, which took broad intellectual practices into narrow, calcified power structures. The Anabaptists eschewed the baptism of infants, preferring to have an 18 year old understand the ideas involved before committing to them. That was moving in the direction of intellectualism. They also took advantage of the print press and read and taught the Bible in German as opposed to Latin, further democratizing it. Then, the Amish, who had moved to America, spoke Pennsylvania Dutch at home, worshipped in Old German in church, and used English for commerce, and rigidly held to that formula, essentially reconstructed a power system of orthodoxy, rather than continue the intellectual exploration and democratization that gave rise to it. Over and over throughout history, we seem to cycle through the growth and death of intellectualism, and in its death part of the cycle rises the power systems and orthodoxies.
07/08/2022 @ 12:47 pm
Easy: eclecticism, effusion each exit E exponentially exasperating etymological equations.
07/08/2022 @ 12:56 pm
Alan, whether Americans are or are not able to think critically is not really the issue. The issue is more the degree to which they think critically, in frequency and depth. A lack of an appropriate level of critical thinking can be observed in numerous ways. And, when I say Americans here, I only mean to generalize for people. In most ways I can think of, these observations would not vary greatly anywhere on the planet, within advanced societies.
In our discussion about crowds earlier, one of my fascinations with crowds has been watching how people do things and trying to discover the reasons why. My earliest memory of this was at my third birthday party. I only say this to indicate how long I have been focused on this. Early on, the observations were very simple things. The fascinating thing about those simple observations, though, is that they became axioms for more complex questions as the observations became more complex. Also, actions of individuals and groups can often be broken down into individual tendencies, and the applicable axioms. And, when they can not, that tells you something about behavior also, like mob psychology.
That early observation at the age of three was about physical sensation. It was something like…if I ran my finger along my forearm, and it gave me a certain sensation, that sensation within someone else’s head/physical experience could be recreated by doing the same thing to their arm. I know it sounds extremely simple, but prior to that, the notion of what the bombardment of sensations that the physical world did to other people’ s minds was a mystery. More precisely, it had not occurred to me that, for the most part, they are parallel. I remember when that notion occurred to me. It was like seeing into the minds of the people who filled the room I was in…celebrating my birthday. The next nearly 56 years have qualified that observation significantly. There are nearly infinite angles to approach that sort of question, but prior to that, there was none. That moment was like going from zero to one.
If you’re setting a snare to catch a squirrel, take a long board and place it against a tree, and angle it toward the ground. Then, from a branch on the tree, tie a wire from the branch above the board, with a snare loop about ‘squirrel height’ above the board. The squirrel traveling to that tree will take that board as the route every time. Generations of natural selection has bred into them the behavior of taking the most efficient route. They wont travel across the ground to the tree and then climb when the board is closer and angled upwards. They wont think around the efficiency of the angled board route, regardless of the circumstances.
For the most part, people operate the same way. They are seeking solutions to their immediate needs, and apply their methods repetitively. People rarely change their methods unless confronted by crises which demand changes. Fossil fuel dependency is one example. Population density in the Southwestern US, emptying reservoirs of fresh water, and a lack of vertical housing arrangements, which would use more electricity and less oil is a glaring aspect. Easter Island has no forests. It is believed that the civilization there deforested it to its own demise. However many centuries later, with much more available data regarding farming, the environment, pollution, etc, we are still doing the same things to ourselves. ‘Advanced civilizations’ today are not using available data to arrive at solutions which will prolong their civilizations. We have axioms from Easter Island, and yet, we can’t come up with a solution for 2+2 today.
07/08/2022 @ 1:14 pm
Anybody here …?
07/08/2022 @ 1:45 pm
NO
07/08/2022 @ 1:39 pm
Floridians are crazy about their lawns and gardens without realizing that Florida has been in a 15-year drought that is not likely to revert to the previous rainfall patterns…but we spend around $500K a year maintaining the lawns in our development. Totally insane,
Florida is running out of water, but no one ever talks about it. We’re depleting the Floridian aquifers. The Northern Floridan aquifer is now sweet to brackish, and the Southern Floridian is now saline and cannot be used for human consumption…or irrigation.
I will disagree about the degree to which people with a totalitarian mindset think critically, to take it out of the American context by generalizing it. it is in my opinion that the MAGA crowd cannot think critically because they are doing it all the time…but they are coming to conclusions that…in our opinion,.. contradict the available data.
When “the people” are brainwashed with fake data and outright lies, they come to bizarre conclusions about the available data. They ignore what other people believe to be facts, while believing lies they deem to be true.
The fallacy is that the MAGAS are ignorant, semi-literate clods because they don’t agree with our philosophies…and that’s the critical error that we’re making. No, you can’t fix stupid, but you can’t fix ignorant either if you keep calling the ignoran t stupid.
07/08/2022 @ 1:59 pm
We probably agree about the MAGA re: critical thinking. Frankly, there are many among the MAGA who are quite different from one another. And speaking of the MAGA, and any true believers generally, they are not operating on the same plain as others. They operate on a power model. Those not within the authoritarian follower category, however you want to categorize them, agree that facts are immutable, and all must defer to that. That’s not even part of the equation for authoritarian followers. They line up behind power and momentum. Facts don’t really matter. And when facts don’t matter, ethics don’t matter. Deference to facts is an ethic. It is ethical. When authoritarian followers choose a result over an ethical means to arrive at the result, they are choosing the unethical. The leveraging of power is inherently unethical. It can’t be avoided. Leveraging power either rolls over facts, reason, or the wishes of the free. Power used in the support of facts, reason, or the free will of those in a free society are expressions of fact, reason, and freedom. Power is necessary, but must be regulated so that it defers to facts, reason, or individual rights. The MAGA, and authoritarian followers think differently about that, and by doing so, they subordinate them.
07/08/2022 @ 4:39 pm
I rest my case here…