{"id":96250,"date":"2023-09-23T19:01:23","date_gmt":"2023-09-24T00:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=96250"},"modified":"2023-09-23T19:01:23","modified_gmt":"2023-09-24T00:01:23","slug":"96250","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=96250","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Can There be Good News About Public Violence?<\/a><\/p>\n

Some of us are afraid of bad news. Most of us know someone who is afraid of going to the doctor because they don\u2019t want to make hard decisions about their health. The great news is that most medical conditions can be treated. That emotional reaction is also common when we consider public violence. It is particularly accurate about how we feel about mass-murder. Many of us feel both compelled to watch the news about public violence, while at the same time we want to turn away and pretend it doesn\u2019t happen. Let me bring you good news. We learned how to stop mass-murder in several ways. We\u2019ve done it, so we are talking about actual practice rather than mere theory. The first thing we have to do is get past the fantasy of Hollywood violence and talk about what really happens.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to go back to the medical model for a moment. I\u2019ve had friends who oscillated between denial and helplessness. They feel that there can\u2019t be a problem, or that the problem is intractable so why bother. They become hopeless and vulnerable to people who sell quack cures. I won\u2019t do that to you. I\u2019ve studied public violence for a decade, and there is real hope to stop mass-murderers. For a moment, let\u2019s set aside both fantasy and our fears.<\/p>\n

Part of us knows that what we see from Hollywood isn\u2019t real. Yes, we might be caught up in the story. At the same time, part of our mind knows that hundreds of people don\u2019t suddenly explode in a flash of flame and get thrown backwards when someone waves a gun around. The truth is that mass-murder is hard, and ordinary citizens stop mass-murderers most of the time. That is fairly obvious if we\u2019re willing to look at it for a minute. Again, I promise it will only be a minute. It turns out that you have lived through the critical experiment many times.<\/p>\n

Remember one of the times you walked into a group of your friends and shouted hello. Your friends look at you. One of them points their finger at you and you point back at them and wave. You do that a number of times as more of your friends recognize you.<\/em><\/p>\n

Then you see a friend of to the side that you missed. You wave and smile to see someone you didn\u2019t notice at first. There is a feeling of an unexpected, pleasant surprise. We didn\u2019t see them at first because we were concentrating on someone else in the group. We thought we saw everyone, but we really didn\u2019t. A friend we didn\u2019t see slaps us on the shoulder and asks how we\u2019ve been. We were looking at the group so we never noticed our friend come up behind us.<\/em><\/p>\n

Hold that experience in mind for a minute. I could ask you all kinds of questions about your friends and we\u2019d find out that you didn\u2019t really see them at all. How were they sitting? Who was talking to whom? How were they dressed, and what were they doing with their hands when you said hello? We are not a camera, and we imagine that we see more than we really do.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t see everything. As soon as we look at one thing,<\/strong>
\nwe become blind to the rest of the world around us.<\/strong><\/p>\n

(The hard part starts now, but it won\u2019t be long.)<\/em><\/p>\n

That common experience explains why we kill mass murderers time after time. To put it in simple terms, they don\u2019t see us and we shoot them. Maybe they die right there, and maybe they are only wounded. Being shot at makes the attacker feel deeply vulnerable. Usually, they run away. This wasn\u2019t the violence they had imagined and they usually take their own life.<\/p>\n

(The gruesome part is over so you can breathe again.)<\/em><\/p>\n

There are other perceptual and tactical factors at work, but I\u2019m not trying to make better murderers. The fact is that mass-murderers are vulnerable.<\/p>\n

Where ordinary citizens were allowed to be armed,\u00a0we stopped attempted mass-murderers<\/a>\u00a0almost two-thirds of the time. That also had a drastic effect on the number of people who were injured or killed. Ordinary citizens like\u00a0you saved over a thousand lives.<\/a>\u00a0Again, the reasons might not be obvious to everyone.<\/p>\n

It is clear that stopping the murderer means that more innocent people aren\u2019t getting shot. It also means we can move the people who were injured to safety and we can quickly start life-saving treatment by stopping the bleeding. EMTs get to the injured victims faster because the scene is safe. There are fewer victims to treat, so each victim gets more attention, and the victims are in better condition when EMTs first reach them.<\/p>\n

That is what happens time after time. On average, we\u2019ve done that about every 18 days for the last 8 years. None of that happens while we wait another 15 minutes for the police to arrive.<\/p>\n

It turns out that the murderer wasn\u2019t so deadly because he had some Hollywood super weapon. Mass-murderers hunt us in \u201cgun-free\u201d zones. The murderer was deadly because he could kill at will without someone to stop him.<\/p>\n

Millions of us go armed every day, but we obeyed the rules and left our guns outside.<\/strong>
\nThe mass-murderer didn\u2019t.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure that some of you can see the answers already.<\/p>\n