aftereffect noun; an unpleasant effect that follows an event or accident, sometimes continuing for a long time or happening some time after it … a result of a condition or event -- (Cambridge Dictionary)

In October, 1973, a Kansas Trooper stopped to check a hitchhiker on the interstate. He didn’t know that the young man had come from New York, where he’d just murdered his father. The troop didn’t know that there were warrants outstanding for that event.

As he went to check the subject’s duffle bag, he was shot in the head. The duffle bag contained “a carbine and a Luger pistol.” Stealing the patrol car, the lunatic drove from the Turnpike Plaza, where the event was apparently witnessed. Contact with police was made, there was a chase resulting in another motorist being hit and the highway patrol car came to rest against a parked car.

At least six city officers engaged the suspect who fired on them. While he was good at killing the unaware, he wasn’t that much in a gunfight. He succumbed to his wounds.

A photo appeared in the paper – and was later reprinted in one of the books from Calibre Press – of an officer with a shotgun smiling and hugging another officer, his unattached clip-on tie dangling on his shirt.

Smiling?

In 2024, just a little later, a man who’d been shot with a centerfire rifle at around 130-140 yards, was being hustled away from the shooting scene. He looked out at the crowd. In a way some have said indicated that he was just telling everyone that “he was alright,” he raised his fist and said, “fight, fight!”

What’s the difference, what’s the similarity? One current digital tech luminary referred to this as the “most badassed thing” he’d ever seen.

He clearly doesn’t get out much.

When studying to become a deadly force instructor, even before taking the class of that name, I got information – much of it from Massad Ayoob – about what happens to humans in times of violent crisis; and after.

He studied it because he had to explain it – to students and to juries. The first step in surviving any kind of threat, even the aftermath of the deadly event, is to have some idea of what is coming.

For example, at the time of the Butler Pennsylvania shooting, there was an open microphone near the victim’s position. When protective agents are trying to get him up, the President is heard to say, “My shoes. Get my shoes.”

According to him, they covered him so quickly that they knocked his shoes off. Consider that. He was bleeding from a head wound and he called for his shoes?

A clearly staged event, right? No one would ever think of that.

It’s one of those physio-psychological aspects of the deadly encounter, with a name you see most associated with political pundits these days: cognitive dissonance. If you don’t like the fancy term, consider it analogous to confusion.

Back when those of us in uniform police service were decked out in custom-fit, expensive and hard to get “wool gowns” to go with those silly “patent leather pumps” they made us wear, an officer had been in one of those early morning fights with a drunk that could have resulted in serious injury. The suspect, cuffed and bleeding, was waiting for medical help and the cop was likewise in need of repair.

“Damn,” he muttered, looking down. “He tore my pants. Took 18 months to get these damned things …”

Had that been a shooting, he potentially would hear that exclamation read back to him in court; you just shot this guy and you’re worried about trousers?

Cold-hearted? No, it’s a symptom, a form of the denial response (“I didn’t just come within minutes of being a subject to be examined by the coroner”). It’s an indicator of innocence.

Instead of worrying about the extent of the injury, other injured parties or the existence of other active threats, it was a focus on the mundane, an attempt to balance the mind.

The “badassed” moment on camera was likewise no set-up or theatrics, it was simply human. Common as lies in election year, it was no more than survival euphoria. That’s the same image you see in the smiling cop in the news photo after the cataclysmic shoot-out in 1973.

“We’re alive!”

It doesn’t last. It moves into other symptoms. They vary person-to-person, event-to-event, but this class of trauma is predictable in a broad way. And it can be treated.

The calmer demeanor and the recognition expressions between father and son at the convention, for example, show some other changes. He’d been frightened. Now he seems grateful. He also seems to feel some “survivors’ guilt,” as a spectator was murdered and two others injured.

It was noted by Jeff Cooper that the aftermath of a lethal encounter tended to make “… the beer colder, your bed warmer and jokes funnier.” That’s not a feature, it’s a bug, “a symptom,” Ayoob noted, “so common there’s a name for it.”

When you hear it was a staged event, you seek evidence for and against the proposition. These are a couple of data points against.

— Rich Grassi