Mark Greene believes Americans need to rely less on guns and more on situational engagement.
There has been a lot of discussion online about George Zimmerman, the Florida man who is on trail for allegedly shooting and killing unarmed black teenager Trevon Martin. In those online discussions we often hear talk about the need for home defense and maintaining a high level of “situational awareness.” In an article written in 2007 by Stratfor, a subscription-based provider of geopolitical analysis, situational awareness is defined as: “the process of recognizing a threat at an early stage and taking measures to avoid it.”
Situational awareness theory first arose out of air combat training during the Korean War. In air combat, pilots make split second decisions by which they determine and counter a range of variables and threats. Situational awareness is crucial to effective decision making in such circumstances. Since the military first framed the theory, it has been applied to everything from commercial pilot training to professional sports. When trained properly, human beings can dramatically increase their ability to react and respond to events around them. It can be a so-called “hard skill.”
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“Your Last Line of Defense”
With the proliferation of right to carry laws in many states including Florida, handgun training has become big business. And handgun training often includes situational awareness training. A cursory Google search for the phrases such as this brought up from a site which offers the following class for $25:
Personal Safety and Situational Awareness Training:
You are your first and last line of defense!
Expect the unexpected!
Do you know someone who has been robbed, stalked even killed? What if that happened to your family? What if it can be prevented? It can be!
And herein lies the problem. Situational awareness training in combination with gun ownership has become the panacea for creating a sense of security in many American households. It has encouraged people to believe that by suspecting the worst of everyone we meet, we can insure our own safety. But the fact is, this over-emphasis on self defense and situational awareness can lead to the very outcomes it is supposed to protect against.
In the article above, Stratfor notes that “Denial and complacency… are not the only hazardous states of mind. Paranoia and obsessive concern about one’s safety and security can be just as dangerous.” Stratfor goes on to note that “Situational awareness, then, is best practiced at a balanced level referred to as ‘relaxed awareness,’ a state of mind that can be maintained indefinitely without all the stress associated with being on constant alert.”
In essence, if you are on combat patrol in hostile territory, a near-obsessive focus on the expectation of being attacked is probably valid. But if you live in a gated community in Florida, it can be a recipe for overreaction, miscalculation and disaster.
A prolonged elevated focus on tracking potential threats can lead to faulty decision making and bad interpretation of facts or events. Moreover, the tendency will exist to filter out non-threat signals and dramatically reduce their importance, especially when interacting with groups perceived as threatening. Gestures of friendship, offers of communication, moments of connection; all these things are marginalized in deference to the primacy of tracking threat signals, real or otherwise. Meanwhile, no bridges are built. No connections made. And the likelihood of a bad interaction increases.
Situational Engagement
Imagine instead, deciding to mindfully track and encourage subtle gestures of social connection. Situational engagement, as per Dr. Saliha Bava, is the process by which we can choose to track and engage human connectivity. When practicing situational engagement, there are two levels of proactivity. The first level is to track and respond minute gestures of social connection. The second and more advanced level is to initiate those gestures.
Dr. Bava, a couples and family therapist in New York City and an associate professor at Mercy College, believes that the best way to manage our fears is to lean into them through situational engagment. This engagement strategy can be applied to a wide range of personal and professional relationships.
“When we encounter anything that is dark or shadow, anything unfamiliar to us, we seek to push it away or pull ourselves out. That is the fight or flight response. We can instead choose to connect with the unfamiliar. Engagement or leaning in is one of the first steps for connection.” Bava says. “This process of engagement creates a third option. Now instead of just fight or flight, we have flow. This flow comes from being curious and open to the unknown instead of taking predetermined negative expectations into the dialogue.”
Fight or flight keeps us in our fear while engagement or flow helps us see opportunities to connect. Is our fear coming from a real threat or simply from an irrational response to what is unfamiliar to us? This leaning in or engagement is the only way to accurately see past our fears. Engagement is the only way to determine if we are really seeing a tiger. And on an even more transformational level, the tiger may simply be someone else’s fight or flight response. Engagement can create a relational moment and remove the tiger.
Bava’s point is not to blithely seek out tigers. Her point is to engage our fears, and in those moments, discover valuable social connections our fears may be isloating us from. It is about choosing to create the kind of life you want to live. It is about empowerment.
Weaving the Social Fabric
Like situational awareness, situational engagement requires a significant degree of focus and effort. In order to successfully create opportunities for situational engagement, one must be mindful that there are often local cultural gestures that are unfamiliar to us, such as a slight head tilt with no eye contact as a form of initial greeting. In a situation where others’ social nuances are different from our own, our willingness to learn these gestures is what creates a bridging moment. This moment of learning is how we indicate our willingness to enter other cultural spaces in ways that create the possibility for mutual respect.
According to communication theorists and social psychologists, this process of mutual coordination is how we create relationships and move forward to weave a social fabric. It’s more than simply signalling and receiving a message.
In the practice of situational engagement, we seek to focus on the “we” instead of the “me”, and in doing so, we create something new between individuals and their respective cultures. The “me to we” way of thinking comes from Taos Institute founder Ken Gergen’s Constructionist Theories. Gergen believes we are relational beings rather than individual beings. That the way we know we exist, is in relationship to those around us. We are defined by the “we” not the “me”.
Gergen’s lifetime work has been to redefine what he sees as the central fallacy of psychology, which locates understanding of human behaviour as an internal process. Instead, Gergen believes we are located in the relational spaces between ourselves and others.
How we define where we are located, in turn shapes the lives we create. If we locate ourselves internally then security is something we seek to create though steps we take in relative isolation, but if we locate ourselves socially then protection and security is something we create through purposefully expanding our relationship to others. The very survival we seek to insure, is born out of our ever expanding social connectivity.
We all practice situational awareness. Ignorance or denial of potential threats is not an advisable way to live in the world. In fact, it will probably get you killed. If you don’t think so, just close your eyes and step off a curb. But an over emphasis on situational awareness without adequate social connectivity is creating a new set of challenges for American society.
Put simply, we have lost many of our community-building and engagement skills. Skills that were crucial to our survival a hundred years ago. Our public discourses are moving into increasingly binary cultural, political and racial silos. These silos limit opportunities to empathize with our neighbors, our co-workers and any others who might be different than us. This increases the likelihood that when we do make contact across barriers of race, religion or culture, tensions will flare up and potentially trigger dangerous conflicts.
We have all been hurt at one time or another by persons who are not like ourselves. Whether that difference is race, gender, religion or otherwise, it creates a fight or flight response, wherein we continue to see these “others” as the enemy and continue to react negatively. This fight or flight mindset plays directly into the mantra of threat tracking, and can come to permeate all of our interpersonal dynamics.
The moment of courage comes when we make the conscious choice to not let negative events close us off from a lifetime of positive opportunities. Because if we do, we isolate ourselves and weaken our society further.
Courage and the Social Unknown
Situational engagement then is a strategy for purposefully growing community. It is the choice to intentionally track gestures of friendship, offers of communication, and moments of connection, however minute, ESPECIALLY among groups that may not be directly in connection with us by virtue of race, class, gender, religion, politics or culture.
And this requires courage; courage to lean into the questions and the unknown; to engage people and ideas that are different, with the expressed goal of eliminating the isolation and anxiety that can otherwise cause us to put our faith in only in guns. It takes real courage to connect across racial or cultural boundaries but the benefits are both liberating and life expanding.
By engaging opportunities for connection across cultures, we broaden our community and free ourselves from the cultural and racial silos we can become trapped in. When we do that, our threat tracking scales back to a level that represents what Stratfor calls “relaxed awareness.” Moreover, we begin to form the varied and diverse relationships that we need to truly make our communities and ourselves more safe.
Ultimately the question is this. We should take steps to keep our family safe from threats, but what are we creating if we stop there? America is afflicted by a constant low level fight or flight response that is haunting our national culture. And its a lonely, unhealthy way to live life.
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George Zimmerman had a range of choices he could have made that night in Florida. The tragedy that occurred may well have been the result of too great a focus on home protection and situational awareness and too little of a focus on meeting and connecting with people who are not like ourselves. When we live by the mantra of threat tracking, we create a world in which too few connections get made. In which, fear, anger and aggression are the default responses because we don’t actively seek to be situationally engaged with cultures, races or religions outside our own.
There are always some people who might wish to cause harm to us. But if we cede the battle to them, by virtue of making our lives about trying to spot them only, we fail to form the larger and more diverse communities on which healthy societies are based. And without those communities, our nation is in great danger of losing the social cohesion that truly keeps us all safe.
Someday, maybe I will submit something to this site. If I were a good man… But the m.f. iing truth is that I hate this whole subject. When MY SON was 17 he got into an equally stupid situation involving guns and mindless testosterone aggression but he somehow survived unscathed. Trayvon did not. Trayvon is dead, I cannot find much there to rejoice in. Back in the early 80s I kept a yatch on the Gulf coast. A lot of VietNamese refugees had just moved in. They were shrimpers by trade and by and by they built some boats and… Read more »
Powerful stuff, Rum. Glad your son didn’t get caught in the crossfire.
Hey Rum, First, let me say how much I appreciate your non combative tone. I am also fast becoming an admirer of your gift for making your case. That being said, I must also say you’re a real test of all my binary debate triggers. LOL! One sign of a binary debate is that parties repeat the same points over and over again as if the facts are self evident. You are remarkably smooth in the way you pose seemingly open minded questions based on “facts” that you have already admitted remain impossible to know for sure. But what most… Read more »
If GZ had been a well trained cop off duty instead of an insurance investigator who was driving to Target that night it is hard to see how this would have come out differently. He would have been carrying concealed, he would have profiled TM, called in about his whereabouts and activities, and he would have gotten out of his vehicle to keep him in sight while awaiting the uniforms. After being knocked onto the sidewalk by someone 5 inches taller than him and having his head repeatedly bounced off the concrete he would have remembered from his training that… Read more »
Zimmerman is alive to tell a tale that Martin is not in a position to contradict, and he has every reason to lie about what happened. He may well have convinced himself of those lies are true. Since we are all the heros/heroines of our own little soap operas, there is a tremendous psychological pressure to recast the narratives of our lives to ensure that we remain heroic. Combined with firearms and shoddy training, as Mark argues, the results can be tragic. Situational engagement sounds promising not only as a means of building bridges between communities, but also as a… Read more »
This is very true. I can say this from personal experience. While I lived in public housing I was robbed 6 times in nine months. I am also an abused spouce. In spite of this I hit the road each day wondering what new friend I will meet. Oh, I’m not being, irrational. I’ll soon be getting a gun and concealed carry because of needing it between work and my ride. But just because of having to work in a dangerous place doesn’t mean that I have to see danger all of the time. I usually drive old stuff and… Read more »
It is always tricky to dialogue about the meaning of an event when there is no agreement regarding what transpired. I do not think GZ did anything to “confront” TM. From the 911 tape (the unedited version which is online) and a look at the map of the complex GZ was at most trying to keep TM in sight from a distance. It would have been complete madness for him to have done more than that. TM was 5-6 inches taller and obviously much more athletic. Who goes looking for an ass-kicking? Concealed carry courses everywhere could not be more… Read more »
Mark I appreciate what you are trying to do. FWIW, I know a lot about Texas. But there is a problem here that is exactly the problem with so many of the “conversations” that so many wanted to have around race, class, etc. during the critical phase of the Duke fake rape case – If no rape of any kind had occurred, there would not have been any reason to have them; therefore, calling for such conversation presumed on some level the guilt of those 3 guys. And all this was being put on in full view of the jury… Read more »
Rum, I get what your saying here, but I’m not talking about race and class. The issue isn’t injustice for me. I think I know which “conversations” you are talking about. You are talking about people framing the Duke Rape Case as proof of injustice against poor folks. I get that. (Jesus H. Christ, now you have me talking about THE case that proves your point about guys like Al Sharpton. Terrific. You see how this process works?) I am saying that we as Americans are too ready to view things through a lens that is prejudicial in all cases… Read more »
Mr. Greene: I’ll be nice. No, he wasn’t on patrol that night according to the city of Sanford. And no, you don’t know if he didn’t store the gun in his truck, rather than deliberately take it from his home and store it on his person, but if I wanted to be unfair I could probably see you imagining him strapping on holster and putting on a cowboy hat. But you are right. He could have made different choices. So could Mr. Martin. If you believe in free will, you pretty much have to give them the ability to make… Read more »
Thanks for meeting me halfway, Clarence. I want to be clear that my view isn’t that GZ is guilty of murder. George Zimmerman is part of my thesis because he does something MOST of us don’t do. He arms himself on the street. He loads a chamber and confronts someone he doesn’t know based on his observation of that person and the assumptions he came to based on that observation. And he didn’t just call the cops. He got out of his car and confronted someone. At the most basic level, that makes him part of my thesis. No choice… Read more »
Mr. Greene: “George Zimmerman had a range of choices…” You don’t know that, at least insofar as the actual fight was concerned because you don’t know what situation he was facing, so all you have is speculation. Of course you also don’t know what might have caused George Zimmerman to be suspicious in the first place, and without knowing that you can’t even fairly judge his decision making process. It’s not George Zimmerman’s job to prove his innocence and it’s not my job to prove his state of mind. This post has some good points, but you chose to illustrate… Read more »
Insofar as the fight was concerned. Yes. But that night? Zimmerman had many many choices. Starting with whether to arm himself and patrol.
As for my article, I said all of five sentences about Zimmerman. Your choice to ignore the thrust of my article and make this about Zimmerman is just that. Your choice. Zimmerman is an example of choices going on all over this country. He’s fair game to start a bigger discussion. I don’t accept your premise that I don’t have that right.
Here’s the main point I disagree with your article: If you don’t know what happened with Mr. Martin and Mr. Zimmerman (who is claiming self-defense) than using Mr. Zimmerman to illustrate your point in a way in which you presume a whole boatload of crap about him ( you don’t know what Zimmerman was trying to do, you don’t know the circumstances under which he had the physical altercation with Martin, and you don’t know who attacked first) is obnoxious and prejudicial. I wrote a post on the Duke Rape Case for this site: https://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/duke-lacrosse-metanarratives-the-telephone-effect-and-the-falsely-accused/ I’m beginning to wonder if… Read more »
Clarence, we would love to have you write another post like your previous one. Thanks for thinking of it.
Lisa:
I will admit to being rather flattered that you even noticed. I’ll think about it. Please understand the process of getting the links together for the Duke post was almost two days. It’s much easier to state that so-and-so did such and such, relying on no proof other than prejudice and supposition. It’s much harder to disprove. The amount of misinformation (stuff that can already be disproved or the media has had to retract) out there about the Zimmerman case is already astounding, and that’s without even having the autopsy or other forensics available yet.
Hi Clarence,
I agree that it seems like it would be impossible to state anything as fact at this point — other than that Trayvon was shot and killed and Zimmerman owned the gun that killed him.
But if you would like to write a post on how you see the situation and how we collectively got to where we are now with the “dueling narratives” we will publish it.
Lisa: What I could do and would be safest would be to simply debunk a few of the lies and errors that were and are commonly put out about this case. If I start examining the “competing narratives” at this point, I’d be adding some illumination but only at the cost of some heat and I really want to be fair to both the living and deceased in this case, so don’t think that would be appropriate. I’m not a big fan of the Martin families lawyers or the PR firm they have hired to push their particular narrative in… Read more »
Heh.
I should add there’s still a possibility this case will not go to trial as it could be dismissed at the upcoming hearing if they convince the Judge of “Stand Your Ground”, or there could be a plea bargain.
See how easy this is? People are already in this thread (including me in a moment of sloppiness) assuming there already is or will be a trial. There might not be.
Clarence, that sounds very reasonable. thanks.
Ok, I’ll write the post.
You’ve certainly given me enough attention! lol
I’ll aim for Tuesday or Wednsday if that’s good for you.
Hey Clarence,
Just for the record, I’m speaking about a group of people I grew up with as a native Texan. I am speaking about that group here, IE gun rights supporters who live from a situational awareness, home defense perspective. If you have evidence that George Zimmerman is not thinking in those general ways, please let me know.
Yeah, the can be taken away from you is a real concern. It happens to be a common way for cops to die in the line of duty. The way I was trained, civilian self defense with a firearm is integrally built in with the notion of always de-escalate, always retreat, hide if you can, let them have all your furniture, and only when the bad guys have pursued you and/or cornered you do you send rounds down range. It is the soundest approach morally and legally. And this is easy to understand and to teach. Most street crimes can… Read more »
This is why I study martial arts. Guns may be effective but they are too deadly. And they can be taken away from you.
To me, the grimmest part of this whole story has been the number of commenters all over the web who have claimed that, according to how they see it, GZ following Trayvon and showing suspicion was a behavior that justified a physical, possibly lethal, response by Trayvon and that by so doing TM was just standing his ground and acting the way they would expect someone to react.
Wow.
That sold another million Glocks.
Not for nothin dude but if someone follows me down a dark alley at night and runs up on me, I feel completely justified kicking the crap out of them. Lesson: don’t run up on people in dark alleys.
Jimmy No one has suggested that pursuing and trying to corner a stranger at night is a good idea. However, the only reason that you or anyone else thinks that is what happened in this case is because of the efforts of the PR firm hired by the Crump law firm hired by the Martin family. Not even the special prosecutor handling the case even alleges it in the charging affaidavit. Actually listening to the entire 911 tape produces the opposite impression. Dude, you have been lied to by some very professional liars. This story is developing hour by hour.… Read more »
No, actually the tragedy is this. That there are a lot of people who are automatically ready to assume that a black kid is a violent criminal wannabe. Your narrative implies that TM attacked GZ. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Did he do so in a way that qualifies as “possibly lethal”? Without a weapon? You’re stretching your argument as far as you need to in order to achieve your goal. You’re talking like a defense lawyer for GZ. And that’s happening all over the net. I would appreciate it if you would admit that you’re making a case… Read more »
Mark There is indeed an explosion of support for GZ. Maybe you have watched the Fox News interview with Alan Dershowitz. Professor Deshowitz was nearly unable to control himself. He was very, very angry at being having been lied to so thoroughly by the legacy media and the Florida Special Prosecutors. He was saying they should worry about going to jail themselves. He is generally quite liberal. Of course we live in bubbles and make too many snap judgements about people who are obviously from a different bubble. I think that is always worthwhile to talk about. But GZ is… Read more »
Hey Rum, I appreciate your skepticism regarding prosecutors and the legal system. I get that. And I appreciate how you have hung in here and made me hear you without getting personal. So, thanks for that. I want to be clear that I’m really not trying to make a case one way or another about these two people. Why? Because its the perfect case to drive people into binary polar opposite positions and create more divisions. I’m sick of these goddamn endless divisions. Really sick of them. And although a lot of folks are primed and ready to shoot people… Read more »
If I were to condense and re-phrase your article as if it were unconnected to this present case, I would do it this way: “Profilling”, while necessary for basic street level safety, is inherently offensive and hurtful to everyone who is on the receiving end, whether they merit suspicion or not. This always frays the social fabric/social trust that we inevitably depend on for a large part of our safety. The solution, or at any rate the best option, is to deliberately learn more about the real life people we are likely to have to react to in scary situations… Read more »
Re: Trayvons mind set. Trayvon was an eager user of social media. The PR firm hired by his family managed to delete his entire Facebook presence but 100s of his twitters were found, along with realistic recent pictures. Not the one all over the newspapers that was taken when he was about 12. Anyone genuinely curious can find them online and form ones own conclusions. A good place to start is The Last Refuge blog. I hate to speak ill of anyones dead son. But it is pretty clear that TM was seriously out of control and primed to get… Read more »
In a case I linked a white man was beaten up almost to death by 20 blacks. A gun would really help him out since, you know, he was attacked by a mob in his own house. Would you call him insecure ? The truth is, a weapon, especially a firearm, is often the only and last line of defense of most people; I mean- how can you defend yourself with your own fists against 20-1 ?
Did you even read the article you posted a link to? The man who got beaten up is described below: “The mayor of Mobile, Ala. said Tuesday that the brutal beating of Matthew Owens was not a hate crime, as new details emerge implicating the victim as the instigator. About 20 African American adults beat Owens into critical condition on Saturday night after an argument between the victim and some kids at a local basketball court, witnesses said. One person claimed that Owens spewed racial slurs at the group and even pulled out two knives, according to WPMI. “It was… Read more »
How is that not a hate-crime?
You mean, the people who nearly killed him said he had two knives right ? And that he threatened their kids (no one was hurt or anything) so instead of calling the Police they ganged up and did their best to kill that guy ? How is that not a lynching and a hate crime ?
So… a black mob gangs up on a guy.
Black mayor says it was not a hate crime.
Reverse races and guess what liberals would say.
So, what you’re saying is the following. If a black man approached a bunch of white people and their kids and started yelling, “I hate your white kids and I want to kill them,” and got beat up for his trouble, that would be a hate crime? I seriously doubt it.
By the way, you guys REALLY REALLY REALLY need to write an article for the Good Men Project. Cause you want very badly to talk about the events around Trayvon Martin’s death. More than you want to talk about what I wrote about.
No.
A bunch of kids accuse a man of threatening him and then a mob comes to his house and nearly kills him. Sounds nice ?
I think it’s important to compare apples to apples. “got beat up” doesn’t really describe getting beaten almost to death by 20 people.
Honestly, who are these paranoid freaks who can’t leave their homes without strapping on a gun?
And how can a man with this mentality consider himself manly, courageous, adult even?
Seems terribly cowardly and insecure to me to have to lock and load just to leave for work in the morning. If that’s your mindset, move to Wyoming or someplace where there are few people, take a few deep breaths when you get there, and relax. You need the rest. Society is clearly too taxing for your intense manly courage to handle on a daily basis.
In the early days of the Duke Fake Rape Case, a vast amount of comment was generated about the topics of race, class, sexual power, campus culture and so on – all predicated 100% on the notion that some kind of rape had occurred. IMHO, those are worthwhile things to talk about, just not in the context of deciding the fate of some young men who in real life were guilty of nothing except perhaps being too trusting of authority. The real lesson, imho, from the Duke cases is that there are human predators (individuals and mobs) out there who… Read more »
Well, here’s a case where people did not rely on guns. Just, you know, good old nec Hercules contra plures.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/matthew-owens-beating-hate-crime-trayvon-martin-alabama_n_1452096.html
It sure looks to me that not one responder in this blighted little corner of the blogosphere has any remainlynstrenthnto
++A
Yes, my own lack of remainlynstrenthnto++A has caused me many a sleepless night.
Trayvon Martin was a reasonably smart kid who was flirting big time with the gangsta lifestyle. He had gotten a suspension from school for being in possession of a sack containing a big screw driver and a lot of womens jewelry. It is very unlikely that he had only done that once and then got caught. Given this background, he must have known what a neighborhood watch guy was, that they were active in his temporary new place (because there were signs everywhere), and that they were never armed (because wanna be burglars care about that). If, as looks really… Read more »
No. Just a plain old, straight up, no. To all of this.
Mark, You don’t find it a tiny bit ironic that you just wrote a whole piece about “making connections” with people who may be of different “politics or culture” and then you immediately pass up an opportunity to hear out someone who disagrees with you and forge a connection over why they disagree? I’m asking in all seriousness, because I find this to be the biggest problem I have observed when trying to understand those I disagree with. I genuinely try to forge connections. I spend time finding out what people who disagree with me think, and why. I’ve done… Read more »
Hi Mike, Thanks for your post. I wrote an article about connecting across cultural silos. I did not write an article about George Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence. Yet, Rum skipped what I was writing about and instead posted a lot of stuff about Trayvon Martin that frames him as an aspiring criminal. To me, his position is pretty clear. Rum’s not here to discuss my article. He’s here to do one thing. Attack Trayvon Martin. For the record, I have already written on this site that I don’t know what happened that night. That law enforcement officials with a lot… Read more »
Mark, To begin with, I strongly suspect that you very well know groups of people who disagree with you (after your piece on Roger Ailes, regular viewers of Fox News come to mind). I want to know what you are doing to try and understand their positions and hear them out. Because looking at your other work, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of that going on, just a lot of identifying people you disagree with, and then calling them out for it. That’s the same thing that happened here with respect to Rum’s comment. Rum clearly wants to… Read more »
Look Mike. I’m happy to talk about your or my world view. But Rum wants to tell me what Martin’s world view was. Do you see the difference? I do.
What. The. Hell. Dude. Are you from Mars?
Naaaaah! Screw that noise. You’re Americans. Shoot first and ask question later. That’s the way it was done in the old west, so it should work perfectly fine now. To hell with the dead black kids.
I’m just repeating what I’ve read on the Internets from your fellow Americans. Glad they aren’t running around in my city with guns!
The Wet (not American) One