As someone from the more “redneck” side of America, the sound of gunfire doesn’t bother me that much, at least not in a rural area.
Which is not actually a good thing in the “survival instincts” department, because that one time I was being shot at, it really didn’t register that my life was in danger until I was hearing bullets whizz past and my dad was yelling at me to get back in the car.
(The looney tunes gunfire sound is…actually surprisingly close to what actual bullets sound like??It’s this screaming NYOOM kind of sound that is kind of, jarring and inappropriate coming from something that will kill you.)
At no point did it really hit me that I could have died. At the time I remember reasoning that if someone was just pissed that we were on their property (we were trying to find where my Mamaw’s kinfolks were buried! in a cemetery! Assholes…) they wouldn’t be shooting to kill.
Later I realized that it was just as likely that they were shooting at targets elsewhere in the woods and didn’t even know we were there, which makes the situation scarier, since a stray bullet could have hit any one of us.
…I don’t guess this improves the picture of America painted by this post.
There are so many guns here. There are incidents of literal toddlers shooting and killing people because they grabbed a gun out of their mom’s bag like literally every other day. People will just walk around Walmart with guns on their hip in full view of everyone and it’s normal.
And yet, to be honest I don’t have the gut-level Fear of seeing a guy carrying a gun in walmart like I do seeing a cop. Cops scare the hell out of me; in a confrontation with a cop, any action outside of immediate compliance with whatever demand might provoke escalation, and normal human responses to threats and intimidation are reasons to arrest you or attack you. There’s the fact that American civilians are brutalized or murdered by cops constantly, but also if a woman is detained or arrested the risk of being sexually abused or assaulted is very very present.
The thing is, I’ve been impressed with gun safety by people who can competently handle guns my whole life and I’ve been in Krav Maga where a big part of it is stress drills conditioning yourself to respond in very high-adrenaline situations, and it’s been fucking scary to learn how little training cops receive in light of that. All those aggressive and fearful and hyper-alert brain chemicals make you a fucking crazy idiot.
Like, I understand on some level how it happens that cops go from pulling a guy over for speeding to murdering him. If you threaten and intimidate someone, they’re going into fight or flight mode, and if you don’t have a good handle on your emotions and reactions and immediately start taking steps to calm everybody down and de-escalate, that powerful adrenaline is going to kick on and aggression and screaming is going to feel real good and if you keep feeding and escalating that state of hyper-arousal you’ll be high as a fucking kite on rage and fear (which is a human thing) and I reckon if you’ve got a uniform that grants you that feeling of legitimacy, the inhibitions that make you stop short of violence aren’t going to stop you (which is an authoritarianism thing).
And if you’re already seeing someone as a threat because of their race or because they’re acting “erratically” in the middle of a mental health crisis, or if you just have hate in your heart for those or whatever other reasons, it’s going to be way worse.
It really freaks me out when I see news stories with cops pointing guns at civilians ever, even if nobody got killed, because I was always taught that you don’t even point a gun at something you don’t intend to kill. And if you hand someone a gun and say “here, this is your tool for solving problems” that has some implications for the kinds of actions they will take in any given situation, hmm?
