Bonnie, after the deed is done, hindsight always arrives, ready to make sense of it all. What can we learn asks hindsight?
When it comes to a school shooting the only people who can honestly and competently answer that question are those who were there when it happened. Everyone else is just guessing. And in my mind, guessing is dangerous.
Very few Americans have any experience with violence. As a result, they have no idea how their brains will react to violence.
The human brain reacts to violence by releasing chemicals that paralyze us (the freeze response) or give us a temporary boost of power (the fight or flight response). Most of us have had a close call while driving -right? We almost hit someone and suddenly our entire body is electrified by tension. It takes time to calm down. Most people cannot remember what happened in the second between the time they saw the danger and the time it had passed. People cannot remember if, in that one second of time, they froze, turned the wheel, or jammed on the brakes. Most people “believe” they did all three. If these people credit themselves with good responses, their chance of hitting someone next time goes up.
We can guess all we want, but until we are confronted by real danger we have no way of knowing what our reaction might be.
A confrontation with real danger, is not the time to discover that freeze is your fear reaction. It is not the time to discover, you cannot think straight when those chemicals flood your system. It is not the time to discover, that your fear reaction is flight, but you’re not physically capable of it.
The mother who ran into that school, was not functioning on her brain’s automatic reaction to danger. She drove 40 minutes to get to her kid’s school. She arrived sufficiently determined to rescue her children to find herself handcuffed. She maintained enough self-control, to convince the police to uncuff her and knew know exactly what she would do, if they did. She jumped a fence and ran into the building and emerged with her children. That mother was responding – not reacting.
And that is what I think people need to understand about themselves. Until we face real danger, in real life, it is impossible to know how we will react. While we like believe our “instincts” would kick in and enable us to save our children, that “instinct” is a dangerous myth (because it does not exist). Fight, flight or freeze are our real instincts, and very few of us will ever know which one is ours.
In my mind, the police, and I mean all of them, are the reason mass-murderers, criminals and mentally-ill people have guns. Until the police officers of this country, find the moral courage to stand up and admit that they are as frightened of guns as we are, these mass-shootings will continue to spread across the nation.
