@fobone
One thing I think is worth mentioning is that, in my understanding of these matters, one of the most difficult parts of training soldiers is not – as one might suppose – getting them to follow orders and do what they’re told. Most humans, for better or for worse, tend to be natural followers. The most difficult part tends to be having to get the soldiers to be able to kill. I don’t mean kill in do-or-die, fight-or-flight situations where you can barely think past your terror and adrenaline, I mean consciously, deliberately choose to kill someone else. Most of the time, people can’t do it. And even when someone can do this through terror and survival instinct, then once things sow down and they can fully process what happened… well, it’s rarely a pleasant situation, let’s put it this way.
We’re social animals. We’ve always been, since before our ancestors would even have been recognizable as monkeys. We are very much the result of nearly a hundred years of natural selection favoring empathy and willingness to cooperate, because that’s what it takes to thrive in a group. For all our faults, once we actually see each other face to face and recognize a fellow human face, we empathize with each other, and we do so quickly. What this means is that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when someone has to heft their gun and decide to end a life… they can’t do it. It can be incredibly difficult to bring yourself to kill, and even if you can there’s almost no way to do it without it being a traumatic experience.
Outside of soldiers, who have gone through a very great deal of training to both be able to kill when they need to and to handle the side effects -
and sometimes it doesn’t work there, either - the only way for people to do what Trump and his crew of idiots are proposing is to either demonize the people you’re trying to kill to the point you no longer really register them as human, to be severely disturbed, or to be an out-and-out psychopath.
This is all assuming, mind you, that the potential shooter and potential cadaver are strangers with no ties. When you’re asking for a teacher to shoot someone who could very well be one of their students, a teenager like those they’ve spent their life teaching and trying to help… no. It doesn’t work that way.
