This is so heartbreaking. We put kids and cops in an impossible situation, here’s how I know for a fact that when you hear assault weapons shot, your fight or flight AUTOMATICALLY kicks in. There is no way to pretend to be dead…and that’s heartbreaking. This is why when tRump said he would have “ran into” that school in Florida, I knew he was a lying piece of sh*t. I know we have all been raised on Hollywood films, where the good guy always hits his target, and the bad guy can’t hit the good guy for all the tea in China. BUT that’s NOT how it works. These shooters, from the time they were young kids likely trained on first person video games for years. And their weapons are deadly, and in real life NOBODY runs towards gunfire. Please feel free to correct me if you are military and actually saw ACTIVE combat. My father was a machinegunner in WWII, and he told me plenty of stories.
Years ago I worked on the film RIPD. We had a scene of a Meth Lab in which MAKE BELIEVE SWAT raided us. I had to play a corpse on the ground as the actors came in with semi-automatics with BLANKS and shot above my head. Shooting as they stepped over my body. Mind you…they weren’t even shooting at me. I was wearing ear-plugs, I KNEW I was safe. But you know what I felt. Terror. Even with safety on set, the hot shells from the guns discharged and tapped my face. The noise was so loud it LITERALLY HURT my ears. And the there is a response the body has to that kind of power, that NOBODY knows unless you have been shot at or over. I was to play dead, absolutely still. A professional actor, serious as a heart attack….and you know what? I COULD NOT! Lots of bad things happened on that set, and for almost 2 weeks after, I was so sick I felt I was going to die, cold chills. I think it was because it was a filthy warehouse we were in…or the gunpowder/chemicals.
That’s the tragedy, not even in the BEST situation could those children “play dead”….because when the percussion of that gun hits the nervous system…you automatically twitch and convulse. It’s natural. This is a nightmare to hear that some kids were pretending to “play dead”. My heart mourns for these children.
