Lizard brains kick in

And even training can get lost in the adrenalin rush. Bryan of Why Now? talks about what happens when you are trying to function under stress:

To understand you need to look at the physiology of the officer in a stress situation. The body changes a great deal when faced with a threat.

If you have ever watched one of those “real” cops shows you may have noticed that the cops are all screaming at people and each other. The reason they do it is that they are deaf from the adrenalin and blood pressure spike. The body reduces hearing to deal with other things.

The other “wonderful thing” that occurs for the same reason, is you lose your peripheral vision. You are in a firefight and you can only see things that are directly in front of your eyes, you have tunnel vision. That’s why neither officer noticed when the bad guys surrendered.

The stress shifts control to the “lizard brain” and all of the wonderful insights and judgments you learned in the academy are not available. Your body is ready for a massive physical battle, or to run like hell, and you are trying to aim a weapon and determine what’s going on around you.

Training is supposed to overcome these problems, and it probably helps to some extent, but in both the cases cited the officers were not given the opportunity to “ease” into combat, it was thrust upon them. All they remembered was to pull their guns and fire.

Then think about putting weapons into the hands of 30 untrained students....