That’s why “keep calm and carry on” was so on-point. Also, the deodorant ad from the 1980’s: “Never let them see you sweat.”
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You mean “security” guards.
Also - fear is the mind killer.
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It doesn’t really take multiple people making that mistake to kick this off. Or even one really. All it takes is a single panicky person to think they might have heard something amidst the clapping who responds by running or shouting something about a shooter. A few more people start running. And people completely un-involved see that something is going on (because it is, just not what everyone thinks) and boom. It all boils over.
As I understand it. It hasn’t been clearly established exactly what triggered it. There certainly were claims of gunshots and shooters, mostly after the panic had kicked off. And I haven’t seen anything to indicate that some one or some ones mistook clapping for gun shots. From the accounts I’ve read it seems that some people not at the area/group celebrating Bolt’s win over heard the yelling, clapping, and general celebration. And those people assumed those were the sounds of a crowd responding in fear. Basically a group in an other area. Able to hear the celebrations, but not see them. Assumed it must be something going down, began panicking, at which point some one or some ones began assuming/claiming it was shooting and shouting to that effect. At which point it spread to other areas and other terminals.
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Imagine if only 1 in 100 travelers had been good guys with guns that day, how much better this would have gone.
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I want to say that this whole thing was caused by just one or two very, very, very stupid and cowardly people and everyone else was just doing what anyone would do when fire alarms start going off and people start yelling about a shooter. Then I read about people fleeing from an unarmed woman in a hijab, mistaking metal poles wobbling on the ground for gunfire, straight-up lying and saying they saw four shooters, and worst of all, the police and security who have apparently had absolutely zero training for what to do in an emergency.
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All it takes is a willingness (compulsion?) to react without evidence. People always benefit from doing a real risk analyses first.
Is there really somebody with a gun, just because somebody mumbled something about it?
Even if there is, does this suggest that they are actually trying to shoot me, specifically?
If I don’t know where shooters may be, do I actually know where might be safer to flee to?
In these circumstances, am I more likely to be injured or killed by a hypothetical shooter, or a real stampede?
(And before anybody decides to poo-poo my thinking here, I have actually accidentally walked into a gunfight before and had to think about this stuff.)
Even if people are (unfortunately, alas) actually killing each other nearby, it might actually not have anything to do with you.
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TSA bans clapping in airports in 3…2…
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WTF is a “good guy”, anyway? Try to help us non-judgemental people out here.
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A White Guy With A Gun (as large as possible) and an NRA membership, that hasn’t (yet) followed through on the destructive impulse towards upgrading to human targets. /s
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Right. And it doesn’t require anyone to mumble anything about a gun. From what I can gather a few (and potentially just one) people heard the celebration from far enough away to not know what was going on. And basically started running. That caused more people to panic and run. It was at that point, people already scrambling, that claims of shooters came into it.
The really weird bit is that the panic seemed to spread to other disconnected terminals in the same fashion. The first group hears the celebration and panics. The second group hears the first group panicking and panics. And so on. With the arrival of the police and bomb squad into a confused but not yet panicked area triggering another round.
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This still sounds like hints of a rhetorical position, but is not clear. Honestly, every week I read several posts about guys being good/bad with no explanation, it seems simplistic. Perhaps that is the point?
My kid has even asked me about whether person/group X are good or bad. I asked them what they meant and what sort of criteria they were working from, and they didn’t know either. I am tempted to think of “good guys” and “bad guys” as being a nonsensical meme.
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ha ha ha. Are you for real?
Yeah, a bunch of primates will stand around doing a rational risk analysis. Oh, then they get eliminated from the gene pool when they do that if there is an actual threat and the ones that always run for it breed.
Evolution favors the cowardly and humans don’t act, ever, like you always seem to presume they should act.
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He’s making a reference to pro-gun claims that a “good guy” with a gun can defend people against criminals or “bad guys” with guns. In the pro-gun argument, “good” means “defending people from the bad guy”, and “bad” means “attempting to harm innocent people for any reason”. He makes the reference because a lot of non-pro-gun people believe that having additional actors with weapons will or can make a bad situation worse. In this case, where there was no one trying to hurt anyone - no bad guy - having a number of people with weapons trying to kill the non-existent bad guy could have been incredibly bad. The situation could have changed from panic for no reason to multiple shooting scenes and reasonable panic.
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I don’t actually exist!
It’s too reductive to frame this as pure impulse. “Always run for it” does not cover direction, so it lacks a model distinguishing between running away versus running to. Risk assessment of some kind might be how you know where to run, and when to move. They only get it eliminated if they did it poorly. The evo-psych breakdown that hundreds of people panicking in an enclosed space is always a winning survival strategy seems a bit farfetched.
I said that this methodology is a way to solve the problem, not that I presumed that anybody should do it.
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A car wreck is emotional on a personal level. A terrorist attack is emotional on a national level.
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Of course. And any one single event that kills 50 people is much more likely to elicit your attention and evoke an emotional response than 50 separate events that kill one person each. And we operate under the illusion that we have control over our own safety when driving a car (if I were to die in a car accident it would be my fault, but I’m a good driver so it won’t happen to me), while we have no control over a terrorist attack (it could happen to anybody).
But none of that does anything to change the statistics, or the conclusion to be drawn from them: fear of a terror attack in the US is irrational, because your odds of dying in a terror attack in the US are approximately those of being killed by lightning (which nobody is afraid of), and because your odds of being killed by any number of activities that everybody accepts as acceptably safe (driving, swimming, taking pain medication) are thousands of times more likely to kill you.
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America, “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave”. So true.
Then the Europeans arrived…
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That is completely unfair.
The continent did fine for another 500 years after the Vikings came by.
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It’s official. The terrorists have won.
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I doubt if there are any “terrorists”, or if there is anything for them to “win”. It’s only a nebulous ersatz conflict between arbitrary categories of people, so it has about as much bearing on reality as one might suspect.
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