Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire VT, a sad commentary on the next generation.

I felt bad when I read this. We have raised a generation of victims.

"Those victims apparently did not fight back against Cho's ambush. Massello said he did not recall any injuries suggesting a struggle. Many victims had defensive wounds, indicating they tried to shield themselves from Cho's gunfire, he said."

Words from the medical examiner in Roanoke. I'm not judging anyone. I've never had anyone trying to kill me at close range. But that no one fought back, but just waited to be slaughtered is just sad.

Henry;

You, like a bunch of others, are not considering all those kids who barricaded themselves in classrooms. Or, the ones who jumped out of windows to escape.

And, you damned sure are not considering the professor (at least one) who died holding the door shut while his students escaped. He was a Holocaust survivor and was shot through the door... repeatedly.

IMHO, there are a HELLUVA lot of people casting aspersions on a bunch of very dead, very undeservingly so, young kids. Kids that had zero chance for self-defense options against an armed and homocidal/suicidal nutcase.

You said it yourself: you've never had anyone try to kill you at close range. Until you have, you have no point of reference.

You (and a LOT of others) forget all those soldiers and even Marines, who after all the training we give them, STILL sometimes freeze up and die in combat... because they are SCARED. It's natural, and it happens. Even with training.

These kids had zero training, zero weapon related defensive options, nearly zero time to react, and WHO IN THE HELL are any of us to judge them?

Again, there are MANY that did do something to save their own lives, and/or the lives of others. But, that doesn't make headlines.


{edited to add}

I'd ask that you remove this thread; because frankly, this horse has been beaten flat on numerous threads... esp. by folks who have nothing but third hand knowledge of the incident, and no knowledge of actually being put into a life-or-death; close combat situation, esp. when unarmed. IMHO, these threads are slanderous to the dead, who died in a manner that few, if any of us could understand, and none of us stand worthy to judge.

You know I have heard a few statements like this since the incident and where I won't disagree about the generation of victimization, I have no idea what I would have done if somebody would have walked through the door and started shooting.
I think a lot would have to do with circumstance and the layout of the situation, but to expect a surprise group assault over the instinct of self preservation I can't say or judge these kids without having been there.
Defensive wounds? Well I guess raising tour hands is the natural instinct of preservation at the last moment.

One can read history and see there has been occasion when trained armed soldiers have done the same thing in the face of a superior foe.

You are free to do as VA suggests, as I would agree, but either way I won't be back to this thread, as it is all hyperbole and speculation...no disrespect intended.

VA,

As I said I'm not judging anyone, unless you consider sadness a judgement.

Heartbreaking, that so many died without fighting back. My point of reference is that I've had to challenge every school my kids have attended, because the policy preached from the administration to the teachers is to never fight back. My daughter was even told, if she was being sexually molested or harassed at school not to fight back, just to tell a teacher later!

Her response and one we fully support, is fight back! With every fiber of her being. Protect yourself anyway you can. Yet she knew she would be expelled for resisting.

I know of the professor who was a holocaust survivor and 76 years old. He saved lives!

I'm casting no aspersions on the dead. And as I said before, I've never been in such a situation and I too might have frozen and been butchered by this psychotic killer.

As far as deleting this post, I thought seriously about it. But considering the verbal attacks, various posted subject matter in utterly poor taste, and at times the insane responses on the Campfire in the past, I think sadness about so many dying frozen and terrified is a thread that can stand.

Henry;

There were plenty who fought back. Barricading themselves inside of classrooms, was fighting back. Busting out windows to escape, was fighting back.

Those that died, most anyway, may not have had TIME to react, or to fight back.

It's not just this generation. Remember Richard Speck and the student nurses in Chicago? If you don't remember, you can find out about them here or here. He tied up and methodically killed eight women. Why did they allow themselves to be murdered? Maybe they hoped against hope that he would rape them and allow them to live. Maybe he told them that if they "cooperated," he would go easier on them. Who knows?

I always wondered about that... If I am ever in that situation, I will consider myself dead from the beginning... and anyone who tries anything with me will have a fight to the death (probably mine). But I won't go silently and submissively.

I don't blame the victims. None of us can know without a doubt what we would do in that situation... not even ourselves, with 100% certainty.

Penny

Agreed, mindset is everything. Had those folks been forewarned and had time to think I believe there would have been plenty of heroes. That, I believe, is human nature.

As it was, a guy just walking in and starting to shoot rapid-fire was likely the furthest thing from anyone's mind, as it was for the rest of us.

An example? On 9/11, contrast what happened on United 93 to what so far as we know didn't happen on the other flights. Those other people didn't have time to react or process exactly what was happening until it was too late.

Birdwatcher

I had occasion to look up Yolana Pawlena. She is a certifiable tough target, and should get attention for her stout resistance to an assault.

This is a lonf read but worth it. We all like to think we'd rise to the occasion but most won't.


How to Get Out Alive
From hurricanes to 9/11: What the science of evacuation reveals about how humans behave in the worst of times


Monday, Apr. 25, 2005
When the plane hit Elia Zedeno's building on 9/11, the effect was not subtle. From the 73rd floor of Tower 1, she heard a booming explosion and felt the building actually lurch to the south, as if it might topple. It had never done that before, even in 1993 when a bomb exploded in the basement, trapping her in an elevator. This time, Zede�o grabbed her desk and held on, lifting her feet off the floor. Then she shouted, "What's happening?" You might expect that her next instinct was to flee. But she had the opposite reaction. "What I really wanted was for someone to scream back, 'Everything is O.K.! Don't worry. It's in your head.'"
She didn't know it at the time, but all around her, others were filled with the same reflexive incredulity. And the reaction was not unique to 9/11. Whether they're in shipwrecks, hurricanes, plane crashes or burning buildings, people in peril experience remarkably similar stages. And the first one--even in the face of clear and urgent danger--is almost always a period of intense disbelief.

Luckily, at least one of Zede�o's colleagues responded differently. "The answer I got was another co-worker screaming, 'Get out of the building!'" she remembers now. Almost four years later, she still thinks about that command. "My question is, What would I have done if the person had said nothing?"

Most of the people who died on 9/11 had no choice. They were above the impact zone of the planes and could not find a way out. But investigators are only now beginning to understand the actions and psychology of the thousands who had a chance to escape. The people who made it out of the World Trade Center, for example, waited an average of 6 min. before heading downstairs, according to a new National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) study drawn from interviews with nearly 900 survivors. But the range was enormous. Why did certain people leave immediately while others lingered for as long as half an hour? Some were helping co-workers. Others were disabled. And in Tower 2, many were following fatally flawed directions to stay put. But eventually everyone saw smoke, smelled jet fuel or heard someone giving the order to leave. Many called relatives. About 1,000 took the time to shut down their computers, according to NIST.

In other skyscraper fires, staying inside might have been exactly the right thing to do. In the case of the Twin Towers, at least 135 people who theoretically had access to open stairwells--and enough time to use them--never made it out, the report found.Since the early days of the atom bomb, scientists have been trying to understand how to move masses of people out of danger. Engineers have fashioned glowing exit signs, sprinklers and less flammable materials. Elaborate computer models can simulate the emptying of Miami or the Sears Tower, showing thousands of colored dots streaming for safety like a giant Ms. Pac-Man colony. But the most vexing problem endures. And it is not signage or architecture or traffic flow. It's us. Large groups of people facing death act in surprising ways. Most of us become incredibly docile. We are kinder to one another than normal. We panic only under certain rare conditions. Usually, we form groups and move slowly, as if sleepwalking in a nightmare.

Zedeno still did not immediately flee on 9/11, even after her colleague screamed at her. First she reached for her purse, and then she started walking in circles. "I was looking for something to take with me. I remember I took my book. Then I kept looking around for other stuff to take. It was like I was in a trance," she says, smiling at her behavior. When she finally left, her progress remained slow. The estimated 15,410 who got out, the NIST findings show, took about a minute to make it down each floor--twice as long as the standard engineering codes predicted. It took Zedeño more than an hour to descend. "I never found myself in a hurry," she says. "It's weird because the sound, the way the building shook, should have kept me going fast. But it was almost as if I put the sound away in my mind."

Had the planes hit later in the day, when the buildings typically held more than 32,000 additional people, a full evacuation at that pace would have taken more than four hours, according to the NIST study. More than 14,000 probably would have perished, Zedeño among them.

In a crisis, our instincts can be our undoing. William Morgan, who directs the exercise-psychology lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has studied mysterious scuba accidents in which divers drowned with plenty of air in their tanks. It turns out that certain people experience an intense feeling of suffocation when their mouths are covered. They respond to that overwhelming sensation by relying on their instinct, which is to rip out whatever is in their mouths. For scuba divers, unfortunately, it is their oxygen source. On land, that would be a perfect solution.

Why do our instincts sometimes backfire so dramatically? Research on how the mind processes information suggests that part of the problem is a lack of data. Even when we're calm, our brains require 8 to 10 sec. to handle each novel piece of complex information. The more stress, the slower the process. Bombarded with new information, our brains shift into low gear just when we need to move fast. We diligently hunt for a shortcut to solve the problem more quickly. If there aren't any familiar behaviors available for the given situation, the mind seizes upon the first fix in its library of habits--if you can't breathe, remove the object in your mouth.

That neurological process might explain, in part, the urge to stay put in crises. "Most people go their entire lives without a disaster," says Michael Lindell, a professor at the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. "So, the most reasonable reaction when something bad happens is to say, This can't possibly be happening to me." Lindell sees the same tendency, which disaster researchers call normalcy bias, when entire populations are asked to evacuate.

When people are told to leave in anticipation of a hurricane or flood, most of them check with four or more sources--family, newscasters and officials, among others--before deciding what to do, according to a 2001 study by sociologist Thomas Drabek. That process of checking in, known to experts as milling, is common in disasters. On 9/11 at least 70% of survivors spoke with other people before trying to leave, the NIST study shows. (In that regard, if you work or live with a lot of women, your chances of survival may increase, since women are quicker to evacuate than men are.)

People caught up in disasters tend to fall into three categories. About 10% to 15% remain calm and act quickly and efficiently. Another 15% or less completely freak out--weeping, screaming or otherwise hindering the evacuation. That kind of hysteria is usually isolated and quickly snuffed out by the crowd. The vast majority of people do very little. They are "stunned and bewildered," as British psychologist John Leach put it in a 2004 article published in Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine.

So what determines which category you fall into? You might expect decisive people to be assertive and flaky people to come undone. But when nothing is normal, the rules of everyday life do not apply. No one knows more about human behavior in disasters than researchers in the aviation industry. Because they have to comply with so many regulations, they run thousands of people through experiments and interview scores of crash survivors. Of course, a burning plane is not the same as a flaming skyscraper or a sinking ship. But some behaviors in all three environments turn out to be remarkably similar.

On March 27, 1977, a Pan Am 747 awaiting takeoff at the Tenerife airport in the Canary Islands off Spain was sliced open without warning by a Dutch KLM jet that had come hurtling out of the fog at 160 m.p.h. The collision left twisted metal, along with comic books and toothbrushes, strewn along a half-mile stretch of tarmac. Everyone on the KLM jet was killed instantly. But it looked as if many of the Pan Am passengers had survived and would have lived if they had got up and walked off the fiery plane.

Floy Heck, then 70, was sitting on the Pan Am jet between her husband and her friends, en route from their California retirement residence to a Mediterranean cruise. After the KLM jet sheared off the top of their plane, Heck could not speak or move. "My mind was almost blank. I didn't even hear what was going on," she told an Orange County Register reporter years later. But her husband Paul Heck, 65, reacted immediately. He ordered his wife to get off the plane. She followed him through the smoke "like a zombie," she said. Just before they jumped out of a hole in the left side of the craft, she looked back at her friend Lorraine Larson, who was just sitting there, looking straight ahead, her mouth slightly open, hands folded in her lap. Like dozens of others, she would die not from the collision but from the fire that came afterward.

We tend to assume that plane crashes--and most other catastrophes--are binary: you live or you die, and you have very little choice in the matter. But in all serious U.S. plane accidents from 1983 to 2000, just over half the passengers lived, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. And some survived because of their individual traits or behavior--human factors, as crash investigators put it. After the Tenerife catastrophe, aviation experts focused on those factors--and people like the Hecks--and decided that they were just as important as the design of the plane itself.

Unlike tall buildings, planes are meant to be emptied fast. Passengers are supposed to be able to get out within 90 sec., even if only half the exits are available and bags are strewn in the aisles. As it turns out, the people on the Pan Am 747 had at least 60 sec. to flee before fire engulfed the plane. But of the 396 people on board, 326 were killed. Including the KLM victims, 583 people ultimately died--making the Tenerife crash the deadliest accident in civil aviation history.

What happened? Aren't disasters supposed to turn us into animals, driven by instinct and surging with adrenaline?

In the 1970s, psychologist Daniel Johnson was working on safety research for McDonnell Douglas. The more disasters he studied, the more he realized that the classic fight-or-flight behavior paradigm was incomplete. Again and again, in shipwrecks as well as plane accidents, he saw examples of people doing nothing at all. He was even able to re-create the effect in his lab. He found that about 45% of people in his experiment shut down (that is, stopped moving or speaking for 30 sec. or often longer) when asked under pressure to perform unfamiliar but basic tasks. "They quit functioning. They just sat there," Johnson remembers. It seemed horribly maladaptive. How could so many people be hard-wired to do nothing in a crisis?

But it turns out that that freezing behavior may be quite adaptive in certain scenarios. An animal that goes into involuntary paralysis may have a better chance of surviving a predatory attack. Many predators will not eat prey that is not struggling; that way, they are less likely to eat something sick or rotten that would end up killing them. Psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. has found similar behavior among human rape victims. "They report being vividly aware of what was happening but unable to respond," he says.

In a fire or on a sinking ship, however, such a strategy can be fatal. So is it possible to override this instinct--or prevent it from kicking in altogether?

In the hours just before the Tenerife crash, Paul Heck did something highly unusual. While waiting for takeoff, he studied the 747's safety diagram. He looked for the closest exit, and he pointed it out to his wife. He had been in a theater fire as a boy, and ever since, he always checked for the exits in an unfamiliar environment. When the planes collided, Heck's brain had the data it needed. He could work on automatic, whereas other people's brains plodded through the storm of new information. "Humans behave much more appropriately when they know what to expect--as do rats," says Cynthia Corbett, a human-factors specialist with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

To better understand how the mind responds to a novel situation like a plane crash, I visited the FAA's training academy in Oklahoma City, Okla. In a field behind one of their labs, they had hoisted a jet section on risers. I boarded the mock-up plane along with 30 flight-attendant supervisors. Inside, it looked just like a normal plane, and the flight attendants made jokes, pretending to be passengers. "Could I get a cocktail over here, please? I paid a lot of money for this seat!"

But once some (nontoxic) smoke started pouring into the cabin, everyone got quiet. As most people do, I underestimated how quickly the smoke would fill the space, from ceiling to floor, like a black curtain unfurling in front of us. In 20 sec., all we could see were the pin lights along the floor. As we stood to evacuate, there was a loud thump. In a crowd of experienced flight attendants, still someone had hit his or her head on an overhead bin. In a new situation, with a minor amount of stress, our brains were performing clumsily. As we filed toward the exit slide, crouched low, holding on to the person in front of us, several of the flight attendants had to be comforted by their colleagues.

Remember: those were trained professionals who had jumped down a slide at some point to become certified. I could imagine how much worse things might go in a real emergency with regular passengers and screaming children. As we emerged into the light, the mood brightened. The flight attendants cheered as their colleagues slid, one by one, to the ground.

Mac McLean has been studying plane evacuations for 16 years at the FAA's Civil Aerospace Medical Institute. He starts all his presentations with a slide that reads IT'S THE PEOPLE. He is convinced that if passengers had a mental plan for getting out of a plane, they would move much more quickly in a crisis. But, like others who study disaster behavior, he is perpetually frustrated that not more is done to encourage self-reliance. "The airlines and the flight attendants underestimate the fact that passengers can be good survivors. They think passengers are goats," he says. Better, more detailed safety briefings could save lives, McLean believes, but airline representatives have repeatedly told him they don't want to scare passengers.

And so most passengers are indeed goats. Should the worst occur, says McLean, "people don't have a clue. They want you to come by and say, O.K., hon, it's time to go. Plane's on fire."

If we know that training--or even mental rehearsal--vastly improves people's responses to disasters, it is surprising how little of it we do. Even in the World Trade Center, which had complicated escape routes and had been attacked once before, preparation levels were abysmal, we now know. Fewer than half the survivors had ever entered the stairwells before, according to the NIST report. Thousands of people hadn't known they had to wind through confusing transfer hallways to get down.

Early findings from another study, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control, found that only 45% of 445 Trade Center workers interviewed had known the buildings had three stairwells. Only half had known the doors to the roof would be locked. "I found the lack of preparedness shocking," says lead investigator Robyn Gershon, an associate professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University who shared the findings with TIME.

Until last year, it was illegal to require anyone in a New York City high rise to evacuate in a drill. That is absurd, of course. Under regulations being debated, building managers will probably have to run full or partial evacuation drills every two years so most people in those buildings will have entered their stairwells at least once. Some people may even descend to the bottom, and they will never forget how long it takes. The disabled will figure out how much assistance they need. The obese will see that they slow down the whole evacuation as they struggle for breath.

Manuel Chea, then a systems administrator on the 49th floor of Tower 1, did everything right on 9/11. As soon as the building stopped swaying, he jumped up from his cubicle and ran to the closest stairwell. It was an automatic reaction. As he left, he noticed that some of his colleagues were collecting things to take with them. "I was probably the fastest one to leave," he says. An hour later, he was outside.

When I asked him why he had moved so swiftly, he had several theories. The previous year, his house in Queens, N.Y., had burned to the ground. He had escaped, blinded by smoke. Oh, yes, he had also been in a serious earthquake as a child in Peru and in several smaller ones in Los Angeles years later. He was, you could say, a disaster expert. And there's nothing like a string of bad luck to prepare you for the unthinkable.


Survivors are not born. They are forged through adversity and tempered by challenge.
-NRA Member-

Piper

Piper,very good read,thank you.

Thanks for posting this article...well worth reading!

Thank you both,

I found it interesting myself and sent it to my friends. Most have never thought about what they'd do in case of an emergency. I'm not an alarmist but it never hurts to have a plan of action.

I spent my career in Aviation, commercial and Military and we used to joke that we had to read from a checklist those things we did everyday and commit to memory those things that might happen once in a lifetime. It actually makes sense though. If you have to read the book when the stuff hits the fan, you probably won't make it.

" I'm not tense. just terribly alert" :-)

Piper

Could this be the effect of shock? I imagine that people in disastrous unexpected situations would be very susceptible to shock.

I remember about 10 years ago I was on my way to prison for a Kairos weekend in the early morning hours. The sun had just risen. In a field to my right (I was driving down a two-lane road in the counry) I could see two deer grazing in a field. It was a beautiful picture... until one of the deer decided he wanted to run in front of my car.

I saw him leap and pulled the steering wheel hard to the right. The deer hit the car in the front on the driver's side headlight, then was flipped and crashed into the driver's side door, taking the side mirror along with him. By that time I had stopped the car, and I remember looking in my rear view mirror and saw what looked like fairy dust in the air... it was the small pieces of my side mirror that reflected the light of the rising sun as it sifted to the ground. There was no deer to be seen anywhere.

For a moment, I just sat in the car and trembled. Then I thought to call Barak. I began crying as I told him what had happened. I wondered, "Why am I crying?" I hate to injure an animal, but the deer was nothing to me. The car was a mess, but still driveable. I finally realized that I was in shock. It probably took me a good 10 minutes to snap out of it.

In a plane crash, for instance. I like to think that I would be immediately on my feet, helping people out the exit. But who's to say... maybe I'd be sitting in my seat crying. Who knows?

Penny

You do wierd things. I remember having a wreck in my early 20s. I was going too fast and ran off the road at a sharp curve. I ran into a ditch that was 10 feet or so deep and hit a concrete culvert. I was totally invisible from the main road above and it was in the wee hours of the morning.

At the impact the seatbelt jerked me so hard that I couldn't breathe. I thought something was broken and that I might die. I remember thinking very clearly, "I need to get out and at least collapse up on the road or I will die in this ditch and no one will even know I am here." I got out of the car and got up on the road where I soon caught my breath. All of this happened in the space of less than 10 seconds.

The funny thing is that later on I went to look a the car, and the seatbelt was still fastened. I had climbed out of the car with the seatbelt still fastened. How, I don't know and I tried to do it again and I couldn't do it. But I did in just a second or two immediately after a big wreck, in the middle of the night, at the bottom of a ditch, when I couldn't breathe. Strange.

Henry,

For what its worth, I did not see your comments as disparaging to anyone, just a simple statement of facts that have led to a discussion that I feel is worthwile. I see no reason for you to considering deleting the thread and in fact would like to thank you for starting it.

Penny,

I bet the next time you hit a deer, you mutter something like " stupid deer" get out and check the car and drive off shaking your head. You've been there and it won't be such a shock the next time; it's the unexpected that gets us.

As far as what you'd do in a air crash, I really can't say but the fact that you've thought about it is a big step. My guess is that you'd be hero. If possible when you travel think about what you'd like to be wearing should you have to evacuate in a crash. My advice is when you get on, look around; know where the exits are, get a pillow and a blanket for a little extra protection, and say to yourself, "if anything goes wrong I'm out of here" and as you leave yell follow me folks! That alone might save some lives.

Piper

Piper1,

After reading the article you posted I will always plan out in my mind what I will do in an emergency situation. Just that much seemed to help people to start moving/acting from the research that has been done.

Thanks! The internet is a tough place to share intention sometimes. I've been misunderstood before and I'm sure I will again.

What makes me wonder is it's been reported that in 1 classroom students were lined up and shot execution style. What makes someone stand at the end of a line while those at the beginning are being shot? I'd like to think people would group and rush to end it. I'd rather die fighting than execution style, waiting for my turn.

Just my 2 cents, maybe I've been misinformed as to this particular situation.

Scott

Piper, we have a friend who graduated from law school with my wife who was in the first tower that was hit. Building security and the firm's managment told everybody to just be calm and wait for further instructions. Our friend, who is kind of a quiet, mousy little Jewish guy from Manhattan, said BS, we're getting out of here and took a group who were willing to go down the stairs. A few more left later in another group, and everyone else in the firm died, because they did what they were told.

Nobody wanted to believe how bad things were, until they were forced to, and then it was too late.

Steve,

Interesting story and I'm glad they made it and that you shared. The important lesson is that when SHTF you better take care of yourself. I think about those that were told to stay put and wonder what went through their minds at the last minute.

I bet you could tell some good ones and bad ones about New Orleans during Katrina.


Piper

I think it has something to do with personality also. If you are a "take charge" individual I believe that helps. If you have been indoctrinated in and believe the "authorities" need to lead you you will wait. I have been in several incidents (nothing as serious as VT or 9/11) where I was the first one to move or do something, I do not know why, I just do it.