{"id":8417,"date":"2024-07-08T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-08T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=8417"},"modified":"2024-07-01T13:12:04","modified_gmt":"2024-07-01T17:12:04","slug":"thoughts-on-post-shooting-trauma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/thoughts-on-post-shooting-trauma\/","title":{"rendered":"THOUGHTS ON POST-SHOOTING TRAUMA"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When I was a kid, I regularly watched \u201cNaked City,\u201d a police melodrama set in New York that was on TV in the late \u201850s and early \u201860s. One of the main characters was a young cop just barely promoted from patrolman to detective. In this particular episode<\/a>, he\u2019s one of several cops chasing a bad guy who shoots at them. He confronts the suspect at close range and the man turns on him, coming up with a Colt Official Police revolver, and young Detective Jimmy Halloran reflexively shoots him just in time, killing him instantly.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He sees the angry, raging mother of the dead man at the Grand Jury hearing that has ruled the homicide justifiable, and for the rest of the episode is tortured by guilt. His emotional salvation comes when the widow of the dead man comforts him and tells him what a monster her late husband was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So-called post-shooting trauma was first defined as a separate and distinct subset of PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, back in the 1970s by Dr. Walter Gorski, a police psychologist in California. I had the good fortune to study under him in the early 1980s.  It\u2019s something I\u2019ve always taught my students to be prepared for, psychologically and emotionally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The years have taught me that these aftermath issues are less a reaction to having had to use deadly force, than a reaction to society\u2019s reaction to the act. You will be treated differently by friends, family and co-workers after the incident, and if it becomes a highly publicized cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre, <\/em>even by strangers. As that episode correctly depicted, in the course of legal proceedings thereafter you will probably see the family of the man you had to kill in self-defense, and you will have to know in your heart that you had no alternative. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the series, available on YouTube<\/a>, young Detective Halloran goes on to shoot several other bad guys, never showing any emotion thereafter. Back in those days in big cities, police shootings were more common than they are now. In Detroit, enough cops had shot more than a dozen people that brother officers coined a term for them: they were said to be \u201cin their teens.\u201d By the 1970s, when I studied NYPD training and tactics at their Firearms and Tactics Unit on City Island, I learned that they had an unofficial \u201cflag file.\u201d If a member of the service shot someone in the line of duty, a flag went up in their personnel file and by the time a third flag went up, the officer was usually taken off the street and transferred to some desk job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This being a gun-oriented blog, I should note for fellow firearms nerds that the detectives in this series all carried Colt Detective Specials, including some really old ones identifiable by square butts, round front sights, and stubby ejector rods. All shooting was done one-hand-only. And, for the blooper file, in this particular episode the detective\u2019s commander holsters his .38 strong side after the shooting, but is later seen to be wearing it crossdraw, butt forward on the opposite hip.  This was actually pretty common  among plainclothesmen in those days, because it made it easier to reach through a buttoned suitcoat. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was a kid, I regularly watched \u201cNaked City,\u201d a police melodrama set in New York that was on TV in the late \u201850s and early \u201860s. One of the main characters was a young cop just barely promoted from patrolman to detective. In this particular episode, he\u2019s one of several cops chasing a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":8418,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8417","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8417"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8419,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8417\/revisions\/8419"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}