You don’t die immediately you are shot

This is extremely gory. I am not writing it to offend. If the description of the process of dying from bullet wounds is likely to offend you, please do not read on.

OK…

You don’t die immediately you are shot except in the movies. In the movies the hero comes out shooting and kills 30 or 40 advancing soldiers/baddies with single individual shots. There’s no real mess, each ‘victim’ just goes ‘uhh’ and falls over conveniently dead and quickly forgotten.

In real life it’s not like this. Unless a person is shot very directly in the head, in the brain, they don’t die immediately and quietly. Even being shot through the heart or lungs gives a few moments of life, of consciousness, and time to make desperate noises of fear and pain slipping into unconsciousness and then death.

When large numbers of people are all shot at systematically next to each other, then, yes there will be some who die fairly immediately, but the majority will take a while to die. The floor will fill with blood oozing from the dying who will find themselves lying next to the already dead, such that the mess of the blood and bodily fluids becomes just one mush. There will be some movement and a lot of crying, groaning and sobbing will fill the air.

As the minutes pass the area will slowly fall quieter and quieter as death takes over.

I describe the scene this vividly to try to labour the point that when a person is shot it’s not as clean as it is presented in movies or in most games. I am also describing the scene in the Bataclan in Paris.

I cannot see or understand or come anywhere near to appreciating what the murderers felt as they watched people dying in front of them. How can watching over and actually causing a surreal sea of dying humans leave them so cold and emotionless?

How could their natural and normal revulsion not kick in and make them feel that what they were witnessing was wrong, very very wrong?

The Paris murders were in public places at which no serious and radical Muslim would ever be found. Bars and loud restaurants, and ‘rock’ concerts are forbidden and so therefore could be attacked and guarantee a predominantly non-Muslim and young death toll. And of course, cause a mainly anti-Islamic backlash. Which is what has happened.

But the murderers were not Islamic. They were instead people of Islamic origin who had been hypnotised to undertake actions that would make no sense to them were they not in their radicalised hypnotic state. Those who had hypnotised them had used the Islamic faith as the core belief system within which the hypnotic state had been introduced and allowed them to be fine with mass murder and then suicide.

Yes, it’s that same emotionless state that radicalised Christian kids in America get themselves in before going around killing students at university campuses, and then themselves.

Why is this ability to coldly commit acts of the ultimate cruelty there within us ready to be so easily activated by the manipulators?