yourself, you had better look it over again. The idea of being on your own should make you think twice about fighting. Don’t trust others to help; don’t depend on them even if they are your longtime friends. Most people intuitively know that fighting has consequences. Some guys will join in so long as there is strength in numbers where others will bail out at the first sign of conflict.
Good Samaritans who may be drawn to your aid could just as easily be frightened away over concern for their own personal safety. You simply cannot count on receiving any help unless they are people whose job it is to act, such as emergency services personnel and law enforcement officers like Deputy Stanley. In fact, the presence of bystanders can be good, bad, or neutral. They may be inclined to help you but could just as easily ignore your plight.
For example, on September 23, 2002 at least ten people allegedly saw 18-year-old Rachel Burkheimer bound and gagged, lying on the floor of an Everett (Washington) garage shortly before she was taken out into the woods and murdered. None of them stopped to help. None of them even called the police. Legally, none of them had to. Many people simply will not get involved, even in cases of life or death.
Interestingly enough, the more bystanders present, the more likely it is that people will assume that someone else has called for help or that someone else will intervene. And the larger number of bystanders, the less obligated each is likely to feel that he has an imperative to do so. A person by himself cannot assume that someone else is responsible for taking action and do nothing.
Plan on being on your own if things get physical. If you’re not positive that you can handle the situation yourself, you had better look it over again. The idea of being on your own should make you think twice about fighting. Don’t trust others to help; don’t depend on them. People tend to act in their own self-interest. Why help you if they might get hurt, jailed, or killed in the process? Some people will, yet most won’t.
Anyone who did not see an incident from the beginning may also be unsure about what is going on. Who is the bad guy and who is the victim? To the extent that we are unsure about what is going on or the situation is ambiguous, we are more likely to look to others for help in defining whether intervention is appropriate or necessary. If others do not get involved, we may decide that whatever is happening does not require our assistance. That is one reason why first aid/CPR students are taught to look a specific person in the eye, describe the emergency, and tell that person to dial 9-1-1 for assistance.
An unruly passenger fought with flight attendants and tried to open an over-wing escape hatch to depressurize the plane. At first, no one came forward to intervene. Then, despite pleas from his girlfriend not to, off-duty Sheriff’s Deputy Doug Stanley decided he needed to step in to control the situation. You cannot expect others to help you in a fight, even where it makes sense that they should.
Many people try to avoid showing outward signs of worry or concern until they see that others are alarmed as well. After all it would be quite embarrassing to be worked up about something everyone considers a non-event. This sort of caution encourages bystanders to appear nonchalant about a potential emergency, inhibiting everyone’s urge to help. The larger the number of people who appear unconcerned about a situation, the stronger that inhibiting influence will be on everyone else, a cycle that feeds upon itself.
The converse of this is also true. The more people who appear alarmed the more likely that someone would decide to intervene. We saw that on United Airlines Flight 93 when passengers and crew banded together to fight back against the terrorist hijackers on September 11, 2001.
Bystanders may help, yet they may even be inclined to hurt you, especially if they are friends of your assailant. You cannot count on anyone else to help you out in a fight.
As Stress Goes Up Intelligence Goes Down
Amid confusion and chaos, your array may be without head or tail, yet it will be proof against defeat.
As the enemy attacks, attack more strongly, taking advantage of the resulting disorder in his timing to win.
When adrenaline hits your system, your ability to think rationally gets reduced, you lose peripheral vision, and your ability to hear is reduced as well. You become tougher and more resilient, yet the downside is that you become a one-task, knuckle-dragging troglodyte.
When Kane took a defensive handgun course several years ago, he was taught to train for handling the survival stress reaction commonly associated with actual combat. To simulate this reaction, students had to do as many pushups as they could as fast as they could for one minute. Immediately after completing the pushups, they sprinted to the parking lot and raced around the building four times, as fast as they could go, covering close to a mile in the process. They then sprinted back into the building and attempted to accurately fire down range under the watchful eye of the instructors.
While Kane could normally hit the bulls-eye of a static paper target much of the time at 25 feet during shooting competitions and always put every shot in the black, the first time he attempted to do so after this “stress test” he missed the paper completely. It was an illuminating experience. Fortunately, he discovered this in training rather than on the street.
The New York Police department did a comprehensive analysis of police-involved shooting incidents, evaluating some 6,000 violent altercations that took place during the 1970s. They found that officers hit their targets roughly a quarter of the time while criminal assailants made about eleven percent of their shots. This study dramatically demonstrated the effects of adrenaline. To look at it another way, highly trained professionals who near universally hit their targets in practice missed 75 percent of their shots during live fire situations. Criminals who presumably had far less experience handling firearms missed 89 percent of the time. Ninety percent of those shootings took place at distances of less than 15 feet.
Not all hits were fatal, of course. During the period of 1970 through 1979, law enforcement officers inflicted ten casualties for every one suffered at the hands of their criminal assailants. In all of the cases investigated, the size, shape, configuration, composition, caliber, and velocity of the bullet was not the preeminent factor in determining who lived or died. Shot placement accuracy was the overarching cause of death (or an injury that was serious enough to end the confrontation), which is clear evidence that adrenal stress must be overcome to survive a street fight.
The more stressed you are through exertion, fear, or desperation, the harder it is to perform. In a violent encounter, your heart rate can jump from 60 or 70 beats per minute (BPM) to well over 200 BPM in less than half a second. Here is how accelerated heart rates can affect you.
• For people whose resting heart rate is around 60 to 70 BPM, at around 115 BPM many begin to lose fine motor skills such as finger dexterity, making it difficult to successfully dial a phone, open a lock, or aim a weapon.
• Around 145 BPM most people begin to lose their complex motor skills such as hand-eye coordination, precise tracking movements, or exact timing, making complicated techniques very challenging if not impossible.
• Around 175 BPM most people begin to lose depth perception, experience tunnel vision, and sometimes even suffer temporary memory loss.
• Around 185-220 BPM, many people experience hyper-vigilance, loss of rational thought, and inability to consciously move or react. Without prior training, the vast majority of people cannot function at this stress
