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VoiceofReason wrote: Footnote: My partner and I got the gun away from the perp with no one getting hurt. I never did have an adrenaline dump. Is this unusual? Is something wrong there?

I misread your post and thought you had shot the person, or they had gotten shot.

I don't think there is anyting unusual or wrong in your scenario. My guess with your situation the adrenaline may have never escalated to the 'rush' stage. I have had those events too where something happened so quickly and was over so fast, that unless there was an extremely traumatic ending (like a dead person) then your psyche interprets all OK, the rush never hits and you go on. My guess is your mind interpreted the threat, your training kicked in and your mind and body responded to handle it without the epinephrine rush. I think this is very normal for veteran officers or soldiers, and those who are well trained. They handle the situation and move on with their business, as it is just part of the job. Once you got home, your mind slows down after you are off duty and have time to start post-analyzing the situation and what 'could' have happened, then you have the post traumatic stress of the event which includes it bothering you that you might have had to take a life.

Excalibur has a lot more background in the psychological and physiological affects than I do and will probably have better insight and what really happens. I was just a grunt officer and never had any formal training in the psychological side.

VoiceofReason wrote: Good post. Excaliber seems to have very good human insight and Keith B brings experience.

I would like to post my reactions and ask your opinions.

I have found that the worse a situation becomes the calmer I become and I am able to think very clearly.

When I was in law enforcement, the first time I thought I was going to have to shoot a man, I was extremely calm. I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t angry. I didn’t feel sorry for the man. Nothing.

When I got home, took off my uniform, gun belt and Kevlar this started bothering me. It bothered me for about a week. I was thinking that if you believe you are going to have to end a human life you should feel something and if I didn’t then maybe I should not be in law enforcement. After about a week I realized the emotions were there, I had just suppressed them so much in order to do what I had to do, that I was not aware of them.

Is this common?

Actually, Excaliber brings MUCH more experience than I do. He can probably answer this much better than I can. However, it is similar to what I was describing. I was not nervous, and extremely aware of what was transpiring, but almost like it was a training exercise and I was on autopilot. However, I had to step back and think about each step to piece the incidents all together vs. one big run-on event. The adrenaline dump did hit though and I had the shakes and nausea for a short time afterward.

In my two shooting situations I was not the shooter, but right on the edge of being the one that shot the guy. The things thing that helped my post event reluctance that someone was shot and killed was two-fold: In one of the shootings the guy was shooting at us already, so it was totally self-defense. We also found out that 6 hours earlier he had hacked his Mom and Dad to death with an ax in Kentucky. The other the guy was robbing a convenience store and once his record was reviewed we found he had a rap sheet longer than my arm. He actually was on parole from the state pen on a previous armed robbery and attempted murder charges where he had shot a stop & rob clerk during a robbery.

Excaliber wrote: The "fog" you describe is a neurophysiological effect that stems from a rapidly escalating heart rate and the stress hormones that are being dumped into your system. The higher your heart rate goes, the greater the impairment to your ability to think your way out of the situation. In these circumstances, your brain will "default" to what you have trained yourself to do - if you have trained yourself to do anything specific. If you haven't it will come up with the equivalent of a "404 - page not found" error when it looks for the "program". In that case chances are excellent that rapidly occurring events will overwhelm you before you can recover and react.

The importance of having pre thought out reactive sequences for various situations is obvious. They probably won't exactly fit the circumstances you confront due to the number of possible variables, but if you have the major elements under control, you can successfully fill in the blanks, even under stress. There are also breathing techniques that can reduce this effect and are well worth learning.

Excaliber once again posts some really great info. Any one who has been trained for combat-type situations will tell you that you almost go into auto-pilot if everything works right.

In the two shooting events I was involved in as a LEO (not the shooter, but one of the group engaged), as well as a couple of other high-stress emergency type situations with guns going, I literally had to go back during debriefing and step by step rebuild the event in my mind to recall exactly how I reacted and what transpired. I had the steps there in my head and could recall them all one by one, but until I sat down and really thought about how they played out, it was almost nothing but a blur. It is kinda like the Chesly Sullenberger landing on the Hudson; you have been trained well, and your experience puts you through the right steps to quickly do what you need and react properly, all the time almost subconsciously doing them like a robot or on autopilot. At least that is the way it hopefully happens!!