I too got this in elementary school. However, as this was in Tulsa, the exercise was actually kinda useful as it doubled for tornado warnings.
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For all we know dozens of people at the Pulse nightclub attempted exactly this strategy and still ended up fucking dead.
A lot of internet cowboys like to chime in on social media after mass shootings to explain how the tragedy would have unfolded quite differently if only they had been there to stop it. It reeks of victim blaming to me.
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I feel that in his prime, Winston Churchill had the guts to take on these shooters.
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I feel like the “keep your hands visible when evacuating” line is the real kicker.
If the dream scenario of a good guy with a gun were to materialize, that person would most likely be quickly taken down by the arriving police. Not much time to investigate which plain-clothed gunman running around is which.
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More-powerful nuclear weapons don’t make the maneuver less effective. They just increase the distance from the hypocenter (not “epicenter” BTW – that’s for events below the surface) at which it’s useful.
“Duck and cover” drills were abandoned because public attitudes about nuclear weapons changed. The laws of physics are the same as ever.
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It would be an American version of a Japanese thing.
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Not only that, but if a god guy with a gun did appear someone would call the police and report that there were two shooters. The officers arriving at the scene might go in thinking there were multiple shooters working together.
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Everybody dies, you can’t save yourself. And although the worst people that ever lived want to use your normal aversion to death to empower torturors and condemn your kin to poverty and misery you can walk away from Omelas. And if you falter, if you stumble, if you turn back, you can walk away again. You can do it. It’s a choice.
People reading this know that if you can convince the site owners I’m victim blaming, my posts will be removed, my point of view silenced, your own viewpoint will stand triumphantly unchallenged. Everybody gets that. That sort of gamesmanship can’t be stopped, if the site’s not going to devolve into an unmoderated cesspit. OK.
But the only victims I could possibly be blaming are people who willfully support the police state because they’ve become lotos-eaters, the people I’d like to rouse, the people who are living in fear even when there’s nothing challenging them or physically hurting them at all. The ones who vote for warmongers and call a policeman or soldier a hero just for not committing egregious atrocities. The misled, the misguided, the propagandized. Those teaching their children that their natural urge to act must be resisted, that tripping a purse snatcher isn’t normal, it’s heroic. The majority.
This thread isn’t about any crime, it’s about a wallet card. A propaganda piece, a memetic device, that serves a social inequality engine that divides us into butchers and meat, stormtroopers and trod upon, heroes and cowards. All those dichotomies are false, those categories can be rejected, in the end those framings serve only the worst of us, less than 10% of us, probably less than 1%.
I would expect so, that’s what cops do. But again, everyone dies, it’s not necessarily important (and I don’t pack heat or recommend others do so). I saw an unarmed man punch a kid with a gun* right in the solar plexus. He wasn’t a hero** and neither was anybody else, we were just people acting in accordance with the situation, no different from the ones that ran or the ones that froze. That man’s child was threatened, so he put his body directly in line with the barrel and swung his best haymaker. It’s what people do, unless they’ve been carefully taught not to - and it’s no coincidence such teachings empower an (often hereditary) police caste.
I believe that creating a privileged class of uniformed and armed “heroes” and claiming it’s rational for everybody else to be ruled entirely by fear is what got us here, it’s what makes it worthwhile for alienated misfits to commit headline atrocities.
This card says don’t act, don’t follow any unapproved instinct, don’t care about the world your loved ones live in, instead give the state more reason to maintain a heavily armed and lawless elite. It says don’t respond uniquely to the unique demands of a dangerous situation, it says be a tool of the police state, the fear state. It says don’t think independently.
Nobody has to want to die. But if we silence anyone who says death is less important than culture and society, who challenges the police state narrative of fear, the narrative that says any brutality is acceptable if one more second of needless suffering can be achieved, in the end we’ll be complicit in more death, more suffering, more inequity.
* The gun was fake, but none of us knew that, and the police and/or media covered up that fact afterwards.
** one of the white guys involved was held up as a hero by the local media and it really pissed him off which is why I like that guy.
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And here I was expecting a “Tom the Dancing Bug” based on the title.
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Maybe if you don’t want to be accused of victim-blaming you should avoid likening said victims to sea cucumbers.
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A good example of this is incident in France where 5 passengers disarmed attacker armed with AK-74 and a handgun. That story would be far more tragic if they didn’t act.
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Even rhetorical, non-existent non-victims count? I purposely have not said anything of the sort in a discussion of a real violent crime. It’s very difficult to openly oppose rhetoric that implicitly characterizes every non-policeman as victim, even imaginary people, inside the site’s ruleset.
But I will try, and thank you for pointing it out. I’ll work on it.
Now I gotta go finish insulating the attic. Which, oddly enough, involves finding spent 14 gauge shells like everywhere. Apparently a prior owner shot varmints in the garden from the attic window or something. I’m throwing out dozens of 'em.
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Hundreds of non-rhetorical, completely non-imaginary Americans have died in actual mass shootings in recent years. Some died trying to fight the shooters. Some died trying to flee. Some died while using their bodies to shield others. Some died trying to hide. Some died while tearfully begging for mercy.
Not one of them deserve to be likened to a sea cucumber.
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Bullshit. Churchill proudly walked in public during the height of the war and amid threats of assassination with only a bodyguard or two. When his daughter in law asked him what she could do if the Nahrzees invaded he said, “You can use a knife, can’t you?” He was a courageous man who understood intimately what threats the Germans posed to ALL Britons.
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When the cops are shooting, they’re also “active shooters”, so the same advice applies. The difference is that when the cops pause their shooting, you can give them helpful information about the other “active shooters”.
I’ll be replacing my current printed wallet card which simply says “Use common sense” with this one. Taking it out of my wallet and reading it for a couple of minutes while under heavy fire could be risky, but ignoring DHS advice seems imprudent.
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Hey, that’s all yours, not mine. You’re twisting my words, reframing them.
Death will come for us all. You can die doing things, taking risks, making a difference in your own mind at least, possibly making things worse by mistake. You can die ancient of days in a hospital bed, full of tubes and gasping, without a shred of cognitive capacity to alleviate the endless pain, your putrid bedsores carefully tended and healed so you can suffer one more day, take one more bite out of your children’s savings, generate one more heap of medical waste. You can die riddled with cancer, with no choices left but between screaming in agony or being doped to the gills, with no more agency, no more humanity, than a sea cucumber.
If you want to die without a shred of dignity, your loved ones spending their money on medication and their time wiping the drool from your lip and changing your diapers, that might be a choice you can make, a goal you can reach for. But if you do get to choose your own ending, it will have been mostly luck. The accident of birth, the privilege of having the police state working for and not against you. Luck; to my mind bad luck, but everyone’s entitled to their own wishing.
Personally I’m not buying into the culture of more and giving up on better. I’m not going to tell my children they should never take any action that might expose them to any risk, that they should step back and let a murderer rampage so their own lives might be a little longer, so maybe they’ll get to die in hospital when an insurance company decides it’s too expensive to keep an ancient, rotting vegetable on the shelf any longer. There’s already enough voices in that chorus.
If I owned a print shop and the DHS wanted me to print this card, I don’t think I’d do it. It’s police state propaganda. But people here have told me I pick strange hills to die on 
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Right—because your words were directed at hypothetical mass shooting victims who died a certain way instead of the many actual mass shooting victims who died a certain way. Got it.
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My University switched from hide-in-place to fight back and try to escape in its active shooter training. Thank god we never had to do it. But it seemed a lot more consistent with my instincts to run the hell away from gunshots.
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The card does not say that.
It offers suggestions on how to protect yourself and your family when an active shooter is present and suggests that you stay calm, stay safe, leave belongings behind, and have an active plan for escape.
It also suggests ways to help law enforcement rather than hinder them.
And it suggests that if you’re unarmed, that you refrain from engaging the shooter but should “act with physical aggression” and throw things at them as a last resort.
Interpreting any of that as cowardice is moronic.
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