Heroes Need Our Help to Stop Mass-Murderers

Slowfacts Blog ^ | 5/27/2023 | Rob Morse

[RobMorse]

It sounds unlikely, but it happened exactly this way.

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. A female school teacher who barely came up to my shoulder and was half my weight raced after an armed intruder and shot him. This was a training exercise and we were using simulated firearms that shot rubber bullets. So how does a 30 year old woman defend her school and soundly defeat a 20 year old man? The answers are surprising.

You have an essential role to play in saving our children.

[No name given]

This is what we need in our schools, not the whole commie alphabet nazi junk!

[riverrunner]

Have trained and done training for/against active shooters.

The faster you can use the proper amount of force against them the faster they will stop.

[threefinger]

The most common cause of PTSD is being a participant to or witness of a violent encounter and in its aftermath you feel haunted by the sense that you could have done more to prevent innocents being killed or maimed.

Those who live as a "Sheepdog" prepare for these encounters by equipping and training themselves and remaining ever vigilant so they can meet the evildoer with overwhelming violence of their own. The Sheepdog chooses not to get PTSD but to give it.

Don't be a victim, be a PTSD carrier.

[dfwgator]

Maybe if we still called it “Shell Shock” instead of PTSD, people would get the help they need.

[threefinger]

[webheart]

If you are going to be a smart guy and expect people to read your stuff, don’t put the hyphen between mass and murderers.

[threefinger]

"Maybe if we still called it “Shell Shock” instead of PTSD, people would get the help they need."

It's not necessarily the same thing. They had it right in WWI to associate the condition with the artillery shelling troops often endured but it took the advent of the MRI to confirm it.

Trenches might have shielded WWI soldiers from shrapnel but the blast of an explosion can travel around corners and down into the trench you're in. So even though the shrapnel didn't get you, you still got your bell rung. And repeatedly getting your brain knocked around inside your skull can cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy. What they were describing as "shell shock" in WWI now is recognized as having been CTE.

MRIs of young men who've served in the GWOT and been exposed to (and survived) multiple IED blasts show that CTE is often accompanied by brain stem atrophy. Brain stem atrophy can interrupt the Hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal axis, which causes secondary hypogonadism. Hypogonadism (low testosterone) can cause listlessness, loss of sexual appetite, depression, and even cowardice.

PTSD, on the other hand, often has no organic cause. However, it does share many symptoms with CTE and "shell shock," but they're not the same condition.

[gitmo]