#psychology of a shooting

[prep4tomoro]

Psychology of a Self-Defense Shooting

As a staunch advocate for the Second Amendment, I support anyone who wants to own and carry a firearm. I believe they must, first, have the mental and emotional capacity to accept that responsibility and, second, have proper and regular training.

When family or friends tell me they're going to buy a gun, the cop in me responds "can you kill another human being and live with the psychological and financial consequences?"; because you will get arrested and sued. The police will arrest you and the family of the dead, or seriously injured, person will sue you.

I follow up that they must get mentally prepared, NOW, to know what they will do when they are confronted with a self-defense encounter. The number two rule in firearm safety is "don't point a firearm at anyone/anything you don't want to kill/destroy" and the number one rule in conceal carry is "don't pull/display your firearm unless you intend to use it". In your mind, right now, you must make the determination that you will kill anyone who puts your life, or loved ones lives, in jeopardy. You must determine that you will live with the consequences BEFORE that situation presents itself.

In a self-defense situation, you have seconds to decide how you will respond and you must respond as if your life depends on it; because it does. You can't "think" about it; it must be instinctual, not intellectual. Instinctual in that you have thought about this and KNOW what you will do in response. The attacker has already had time to think about, and KNOW, they are willing to hurt or kill their victim.

Your other options are to run (if you can) or give the perp(s) whatever they want if that's all they want.

Always be aware of what is going on around you and KNOW, BEFOREHAND, how you will respond to a self-defense encounter.

Related Resources: Keep Shooting (Fighting) Until the Threat Stops! 20 Rules for Winning a Gun Fight 21-Feet Rule - The Tueller Drill/Principal How to Survive an Active Shooting Encounter About the Photo

[11-Cs Basic Emergency Kit] [14-Point Emergency Preps Checklist] [Immediate Steps to Take When Disaster Strikes] [Learn to be More Self-Sufficient] [The Ultimate Preparation] [P4T Main Menu]

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[fenrichaita]

Sometimes I wonder if people understand that you cannot make people stop comparing mentally ill and neurodivergent people to like serial killers and horror movie monsters without abandoning most of how we conceptualize and categorize mental illness. It's not like an ableism that comes from outside of the DSM or ICD from laymen, it's entirely baked in. The entire mental health system is about categorizing mentally ill and ND people as threats, liabilities, and inconveniences, while blaming it on intrinsic brain illnesses based on the ideas of typically incredibly biased and bigoted psychologists from several decades ago which are not founded in evidence (and said ideas persist mostly unchanged with the reasonings merely altered or justified with a shrug). The fact that after every mass shooting there is more posturing of "mental health awareness" and increasing MH services, when most mass shootings are committed by radicalized cis (and usually white) men tells you that a lot of this is security theatre. The MH system really just makes it more unsafe to seek medical help but it helps "neurotypical" people feel better, and it is the comfort of "NTs" that is most prioritized by this system. And of course, anyone who commits acts of extreme violence like mass shootings will likely be labeled mentally ill first (rather than radicalized, exc.) because of the circular logic that no one can be a Threat without being mentally ill. Do you see The Problem?

[vatrocvet]

don't look down at me

[2hoothoots]

Revisiting P2 since the docu epilogue dropped and your AMV (<3) popped up as a sign for me to ask something that hopefully you haven't already spoken about years ago: What did you think of the in-game psych explanation for Maligula, that she's the primitive savage part of the mind? P2 is a weird mix of sketchy Freud/Jung concepts that Tim likes meshed with modern psych, and Maligula's deal seems like something they probably wrote a lot of different versions of but never quite solved elegantly

yeah, i think you totally hit the nail on the head - it's always felt like one of the parts of the story that they couldn't quite give enough polish to before they had to finalize it and move on with development. like - i went to go get my artbook to see if it had any insight into the writing process, and did you know that Nona and Maligula being the same person was apparently added way later in development? that's wild! i didn't know that until literally right now! i may or may not have skipped straight to my favourite characters when my artbook arrived and then put it on my shelf without reading the whole thing

ANYWAY, retrospectively i think it being a twist that was added later actually makes a lot of sense in the context of everything you mentioned. the Maligula problem, to me, is the fact that they're trying to juggle a bunch of different things that she has to be in the story. there's Maligula, the ruthless big bad, and Nona, the beloved grandma, and if you suddenly have to also make them both the same person... well, it ends up being kind of a thorny writing problem to make that work, haha.

here's some art i made so this isn't just a wall of text, rest of the answer under the cut

i think one thing they could have done when they needed to rehabilitate a mass-murderer into a lovable old lady was pull back on either end of the spectrum. make your villain softer and more sympathetic, or give grandma a mean streak like she's one bad day away from a tragedy at the crochet club. and to give the story credit, i'm really glad they didn't. Nona is relentlessly sweet and endearing - and that's great! she needs to be in order to make the audience care about her, otherwise the emotional beats are never going to land. likewise, Maligula is a great villain, she's vicious and ruthless and at the culmination of her arc we see she simply does not give a shit about murdering hundreds of people. i love that for her, honestly, you go girl

but then, like - how do you connect the dots? how do you frame grandma having a violently murderous streak in a way that doesn't make the ending of "but she's over it now" feel kinda weird and hollow? and how do you do that while also being sympathetic to the game's themes around mental health? Maligula's informed by the traumatic things that happened to Lucrecia during the war, but she can't just be a manifestation of trauma, because the moral of the story being that trauma makes you a mass-murderer (until you beat up your trauma and shove it in a giant pit) would feel... really tonally dissonant!

so i think you're totally right that the sprinkling of pop-psych concepts we get ends up feeling a little bit like an awkward band-aid. Maligula's story is about how the horrors of war can shape you into a terrible person, who does terrible things - ...but there's also, like, special circumstances, so it doesn't feel weird that she goes back to being Raz's sweet grandma afterwards. special psychic circumstances! she's not just any war criminal, she's the fight or flight response gone out of control!

which - i dunno, i think that line in particular always stood out to me, because that's not really what the fight or flight (or freeze or fawn) response is, right? it's a temporary boost of adrenaline to the system to rev you up for getting out of a dangerous situation. an overactive fight or flight response is called chronic stress and anxiety. i know the games are pop-psych and not actual science, but it always stood out to me as a little awkward.

if it were me in the writer's seat - with the benefit of all the time in the world to workshop it, and no looming deadlines, and the hindsight of having a full completed game in front of me to think about - i might have tried to frame it around connection. i think you could swing the lens to instead focus on how violence, stress, trauma etc., make it harder to understand and empathise with the people around you. the tragedy of Lucrecia's story is that she came home to try and help her countrymen, the people she cared so dearly about. but the more time passed, the less she cared, the less she was able to see them as people. after Marona's death, the Maligula that remains is one who's unable to even care about killing her own sister. the alternative is too raw, too painful - instead, she sheds her last vestiges of remorse, and throws herself into the easy relief of violence. (we see this again, when Nona "awakens" as Maligula - when confronted with the baggage of her past, she chooses to wash it all away with force, unable and unwilling to care about the people she used to call friends.)

and i think shifting the focus like that ties it in thematically, too. a big theme (of both games, but especially the sequel) is how important connection is, how being able to understand and reach out to and rely on other people is a lifeline during hard times. PN2 touches on how there aren't really "good people" and "bad people" - everyone has the capacity to do wonderful or terrible things, and i think Raz's line to Maligula about how "everybody's got something like you" works. Lucrecia was never a monster, no matter how everyone tried to pretend she was. she was just a person, the same as everyone else - and just like everyone else, she could be pushed to extremes under the right circumstances. it just feels kind of odd when the implicit context is "everybody's got a mass-murderer hidden in the primal recesses of their brain", hahaha.

but like, again, that's the privilege of hindsight, right? i've definitely also been on the other side of the creative process, stuck with something i suddenly need to make work in a story and having to come up with a solution that feels like a band-aid. sometimes you just gotta call it good enough, and move on. and i think the game is overall much stronger for having Nona and Maligula be the same person - it plays into the wider themes, it sets up some great emotional beats, and i think it's overall well-executed, even if there are one or two hiccups in the writing.

anyway, great ask! thank you for the invitation to ramble, this is something that stuck out to me on my first playthrough of the game and it was fun to sit down and get my thoughts in order

[thepopculturearchivist]

SIR!, August 1954

[miametropolis]

the fact that david tennant married the woman who played his daughter on the TV still haunts me occasionally (this is nothing against georgia, we love georgia) but the thing that makes me sit up at night in a cold sweat is the fact that his FATHER IN LAW is the fifth doctor. imagine your fucking father-in-law is Doctor Who. anyways.

[todayisafridaynight]

it gettin harder and harder to explain this bullshit

[mold-girl]

This is the latest, and the most enraging, femicide case in turkey

A male who has been obsessed with a girl has killed her and her best friend before killing himself.

He forcefully took her to a historical castle, she was screaming for her life the whole way there yet noone intertwined. He decapitated her and sent the location to her mom saying "your daughter is resting peacefully" when her mom arrived there he threw her daughters head at her.

He has been obsessively stalking her for over 5 years, they had a restraining order agaist him and she even stopped going to school and started homeschooling because of him. Yet one day he decided that he wanted to kill her and kill himself and that was it.

She fought for her life the whole time but just a male deciding that her life was over was enough for her to die.

[bi-disastersoup]

Into the Void - Part 1

Welcome to a new VN series. These ones are much shorter, so I won't be doubling up the images.

Greatly recommended you read Shifters first if you haven't, or some of the stuff covered in this series might not make a ton of sense.

very mild CW for emetophobia and also spoilers for patch 6.2 MSQ (takes place right after the second fight with Scarmiglione)

Let's go.

Strap in, ya'll.

(Part 2)

[purble-gaymer]

thinkin about during my first tricolor match last night i said “oh, there’s gushers?” and threw my sprinkler at one as an opponent approached it. they stared straight at me and then didn’t let me use a single gusher for the rest of the game

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

[thisbluespirit]

Films watched (2000s): Glorious 39 (Momentum, 2009); written & dir. Stephen Poliakoff. Starring Romola Garai, Bill Nighy, Eddie Redmayne, Julie Christie, Charlie Cox, Jeremy Northam, David Tennant & Christopher Lee.

"Anne, listen."

[quotesfrommyreading]

And as the public mourning began to fade and the FBI conducted its investigation, it started to become clear that the story about Bernall, in particular, was probably falsely reported. It was likely another girl entirely, Val Schnurr, who told Klebold — not Harris — that she believed in God before he shot her in the school library. (Schnurr survived.) Bernall was also in the library, though further from Klebold, and Harris did find her. But later eyewitnesses stated that Harris found her cowering under a table, said “Peekaboo,” and then shot her, without Bernall uttering a word.

The eyewitness accounts seemed to point to the fact that Bernall was tragically murdered but that the martyrdom story was built on false evidence.However, who actually said what in the library on April 20 became a point of major dispute, as Hanna Rosin reported in the Washington Post on October 14, 1999. When Schnurr told her story at the youth rallies that were held in the months following the events at Columbine, she — a Catholic — was seen as suspicious, perhaps a copycat trying to ride her martyred classmate’s coattails. Bernall’s story had completely overshadowed her own.

And it seemed unlikely that the mythology would be changed by any emerging facts. As Rosin wrote:

Despite the nagging existence of Val Schnurr and Misty Bernall's best efforts to humanize her daughter, the Cassie myth has taken root. Because at this point, it's moved far beyond Cassie.

"You will never change the story of Cassie," says Dave McPherson, the pastor at the Bernalls' church. To illustrate how far it has gone, he tells a story of traveling to a remote church in Sudan a few months after the shooting. The congregation's first request was that he tell the story of Saint Cassie.

"The church," he says, by which he means Catholic and Protestant, worldwide, "is going to stick to the martyr story. It's the story they heard first, and circulated for six months uncontested. You can say it didn't happen that way, but the church won't accept it. To the church, Cassie will always say yes, period."

  —  After Columbine, martyrdom became a powerful fantasy for Christian teenagers

[rawliverandgoronspice]

oh no I stopped working for five minutes and remembered I love he...................... ;;

[kkoct-ik]

drafting a masterpost about my sou hiyori did headcanon and i cant wait for 3-2 to come out when im halfway through writing it and completely discredit all my conclusions

[lucifer-the-fetus-eater]

tf2 mercenaries based on how much i like them

i don't actually hate any of them there are just some i like more than... others.