The Psychology Of The Ambush

     This vitally important piece at The Daily Anarchist reveals the central fact about those who go forth to murder en masse:

They expect their victims to be unarmed.

     The tremendous difference between the mortality statistics in mass shootings of unarmed versus armed victims should settle that question forever:

• When the killer is stopped by police: 14.29 deaths.
• When the killer is stopped by an armed citizen: 2.23 deaths.

     Note that the cited piece is more than three years old. Ergo, we have no excuse for being at all uncertain about the advantages of an armed society. But I submit that even more important is the psychology of the mass killer: the mindset in which he strides forth to reap innocent lives.

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     It’s been military doctrine for quite some time that when ambushed, a unit must immediately attack. The concept has proved sound over many years of military experience. Attacking the ambusher is the approach that best limits casualties and preserves unit coherence. Yet it takes a great deal of training and practice to overcome the natural impulse to seek cover from incoming fire and go on the defensive.

     Our intellects can easily cope with the contradiction. The ambushers have the element of surprise on their side. By carefully choosing the locale and designing the attack, the ambushed unit, in its natural inclination to seek cover, can be herded into a position of tactical disadvantage, if not immediate defeat and annihilation. Only by immediately going on offense can the unit caught in a well-planned ambush seize the best available chance for survival.

     But intellect is not supreme over the inclinations of the body. Immediate survival is the paramount consideration in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The degree of discipline and training required to overcome the run-for-cover impulse is correspondingly great.

     It was an important day indeed when military theorists realized that that impulse can be turned against the ambusher.

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     The mass killer with a gun is a classical ambusher. He has the element of surprise on his side. He has the run-for-cover impulse in his favor as well. More and worst of all, he has a reasonable expectation that his fire will not be immediately returned. But should that expectation be defeated by reality, he’s in the deepest of deep shit, for he has entered the situation with the ambusher’s mindset. He’s inherently unready for a counterattack.

     No, not all counterattacks succeed. The elements of surprise and choice of context matter greatly, and they’re always in the ambusher’s favor. But even in the worst of circumstances, the man who refuses to run for cover and plunges headlong into attack has better chances than does he who sees the “turtle tactic” as his only hope.

     As I noted just yesterday, weaponry – who has it, how ready, willing, and able he is to use it, and where he is – makes all the difference. This is equally the case in political combat.

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     Among the reasons Donald Trump has been unaffected by the widespread attacks on him is that he remains on the attack himself. He refuses to play defense. Even among his staunchest supporters there are many who don’t endorse all his positions without qualification. They back him anyway, and for excellent reasons:

• First, because they believe he’s on their side;
• Second, because he’s exhibiting a rhetorical candor that career politicians habitually eschew;
• Third, because he contrasts sufficiently with the rest of the Republican field to make it credible that if given the presidency, he will do as he has said.

     Other aspirants to the Republican presidential nomination don’t have all of that going for them. Ted Cruz has it to some degree, yet even the junior Senator from Texas is prone to circumlocutions, qualifying his statements, and couching them in terms calculated not to give offense. At this time, people want to hear anger, even fury, in “their guy’s” voice. They want a Man on Horseback who’ll scream “Charge!” and ride straight toward the enemy’s guns waving his saber overhead. As Mel Gibson’s William Wallace said in Braveheart, men don’t follow titles, they follow courage.

     No single aspect of Trump’s campaign is more important to his current pre-eminence than his display of fearlessness.

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     John F. Kennedy, no great shakes as president, won the office by campaigning in a style much like Trump’s: all-out attack. In his first campaign, Ronald Reagan, arguably the best president of the Twentieth Century, did much the same. Before their respective victories, the bien-pensants were inclined to dismiss them. We can observe the same behavior today among the media and the talking heads, with regard to Donald Trump. Whether the initiative is with him or with an adversary, he always attacks.

     It’s a great help to Trump that the political and media elites have squandered their credibility so completely. The Democrats squandered theirs by speaking and acting in defiance of realities we could all see and touch...and in many cases, that could touch us as well. The Republicans squandered theirs by promising many things if we would raise them to power...and then reneging on nearly everything the moment they controlled Congress. The media, of course, squandered theirs by omitting crucial facts from the stories they covered and by refusing to cover so many others. Their lack of credibility is the key to the current popularity of the “outsider” candidacies, most especially that of Donald Trump.

     I still think Trump’s personality is unsuited to the White House. Among other things, you can’t “fire” elected legislators or the potentates of other countries. However, he’s teaching our elites lessons they badly need to learn...that they should have learned long ago.

     The electoral horizon is nearing. Iowa and New Hampshire will tell us much. Stay tuned.