As legal gun owners, we tend to think of ourselves as the good guys (or gals). After all, we’re not the aggressors in a violent situation, and we only use our firearm against another person when we have to in order to stop a threat, never as the initiator of violence.
That’s a normal human way of thinking about it. After all, I know my motivations. Doesn’t everyone else know my motivations, too?
Unfortunately, though, other people don’t know your motivations. At least, not until they’ve had a chance to analyze the overall situation, and that can cause serious complications after a defensive shooting situation.
Because law enforcement officers responding to the active shooter call don’t know who is who when they arrive on the scene, it’s up to you to make sure that they know that you’re not a threat to them so that they can assess the situation and so that no one else gets hurt after the threat is stopped.
Alex Doley puts it this way:
There is a cognitive trap that kills good people in these situations. It’s the tendency to think, I know I’m the good guy, so everyone else must see it, too. This is not how it works. Officers rolling onto a shooting scene see a person with a gun standing over a body. That is all they see.
Shake off the halo effect. You are not automatically identifiable as the defender. You have to make them understand that—carefully, without sudden movements and without anything that could be misread as hostility.
Doley is right. You have to make sure that law enforcement sees you as nonthreatening. After all, their first task is to make sure that they survive the situation so that they can stop the threat. Until they know that you’re not a threat, for their own protection, they have to make sure that you aren’t dangerous to them.
As you think about this, remember that in the adrenaline soaked heat of the moment, you won’t have the mental capacity to think this through. So, you absolutely must walk through handling this situation in your head more than once, clearly imagining it, so that your brain can default to what it understands to be the way to handle those situations.
The life that you save by doing this may be your own.
