I saw this on fark.com as well... and the following posts therein best represent the classic nutshell: "...from the sublime to the ridiculous.â€
I will say from personal experience… TRAINING TRAINING TRAINING! Absolutely without a doubt, you WILL revert to how you have trained. The body and muscles remember, better than any elephant you will ever know.
You may draw and not remember it. All of a sudden your weapon is in your strong hand and now it’s a race to get it into position before the bad-guy can react.
When the balloon goes up, ALL the firearms are silenced. Guaranteed. You won’t hear a thing. And you will be amazed at the degree of visual acuity you will have. You may not be able to see anything past 30° from center, but in those 30° you will memorize every detail inside that arc.
Your limbs may feel numb, but a day later you may have muscle strain from the sheer exertion of holding the firearm at that moment; your upper torso and arms will be locked into place and it would have taken an act of God to move you at that moment.
If you’ve practiced enough, you WILL focus on your front sight, almost to the exclusion of everything else.
You may tunnel into the bad-guys weapon. I seem to recall a study where they found that a large percentage of bad-guys were hit in the arm that was holding the weapon; because the human mind tends to focus on the threat. The threat is the weapon and so that’s where the bullets go.
You probably won’t remember or feel the first shots you fire. Your mind will be playing catch-up to your body and right then, muscle memory is king and lord of your body at that point.
Remembering that your conscious mind is behind the reaction curve at that point, you may keep firing after the overt threat is over; only after your eyes and brain have had a chance to process the input, you might realize that the immediate situation no longer requires firing.
Is the bad-guy hit? Is he down? Does he have friends? You may have to stand over another human being that a splintered second ago was trying to kill you and you may have to watch him bleed out and die. You do NOT owe him first aid. You may feel guilty afterward for not attempting to assist him, but this situation was not of your choosing, and unless you’re an EMT and equipped and ready to deal with a nasty bloody trauma, you’re under no obligation.
After all the shouting, you’ll probably get the shakes. Nausea and lightheadedness are common. Drink lots of water.
Hours later, after you have had time to process what just happened, you would probably experience these same symptoms again. You may feel frustration and a great deal of rage at the situation you were thrust into. Having had to use lethal force against another human being is a thing of such enormity, that you may feel that it is something that may color your every day after. But you will learn to deal with it. Remember that sometimes it’s ok to hurt another person if that person is trying to hurt you.
Live through it.
