Mass Shooting In Alabama Leaves One Youth Dead, Another Injured

17 December 2015, Grove Hill, Alabama

One child was wounded and another killed yesterday when a paranoid gun owner opened fire on four kids during some youthful hijinks in Alabama.

Wait…sorry. That’s not quite accurate.

What we meant to say is that one armed burglar (18) was killed, another injured, and another two were arrested (ages 17-19) after a watchful gun store owner caught them breaking into his business and they decided to charge at him.

The store owner, who lives on site, apparently heard a disturbance and took his shotgun along to investigate. He found the four young men breaking into his store and confronted them.

On realizing that there was someone else in the building, the youths decided to attack, probably figuring on superior numbers to overwhelm their prey.

The store owner, on seeing at least one long gun in their hands, leveled his shotgun and fired twice. Killing 18 year-old Justin Smith and wounding another.

The three surviving criminals are to be charged with felony murder in the death of Mr. Smith.

The store owner was physically unharmed. However, according to authorities, our Good Guy With A Gun was an emotional wreck.

No normal person wants to harm others. It’s hard-wired into our psyches that hurting people is a bad thing. So when our drive to avoid harming others comes into conflict with our drive for self-preservation that is creates, for lack of better terminology, an imbalance or upset in our mental stability.

As a normal, well-balanced human, this is a normal thing, but it can play hell with your stress levels and your ability to resume a normal life without extensive therapy. If your reaction is severe enough, it may even fall into one of the stress disorder categories, such as PTSD.

This is why you need to train.

Training, combined with a strong and reinforced sense of the rightness of your decision, is one of the only shields you will have to blunt the mental effects of a violent encounter.

Governments spend millions of dollars every year in trying to train their trigger-pullers to resist the mental stresses involved in effecting violence upon their fellow human. YOU, as a regular Joe Civilian, do not necessarily have these resources.

Regardless, we at Interritus believe that it is morally incumbent upon you to seek out the best training you can afford and do so regularly. A good general training program will address you as the whole person, not just the trigger-pressing or hand-to-hand aspects of a defensive encounter.

This is not to say that spending a week at a special camp designed to smooth out your draw while walking backwards during a blizzard in low gravity is a bad thing. But YOUR whole training program should consist of more than JUST that class.

You need to address the psychology and physiology of violent encounters. Not only the psychology involved in de-escalating a situation and physiology required to end the encounter quickly should violence be necessary, but the psychology and physiology necessary to recognize problems within yourself and seek help when you need it.

The Links:

http://www.al.com/news/mobile/index.ssf/2015/12/south_alabama_gun_shop_owner_s.html

http://fox17.com/news/nation-world/alabama-gun-store-owner-stands-ground-shoots-kills-burglar