truckinslave
Posts: 3897
Joined: 6/16/2004
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I was recently derided by people who inferred I consider "threat assessment" and "situational awareness" a matter of normal everyday life. Their inferrence was correct, their derision stupid.
Not too long ago at all I was driving in the middle of the night when I saw the brake lights of a car stopping above my lane on the near side of an overpass a short distance ahead. Just a country highway crossing the superslab; no exit or onramp to the highway. "damn" I thought to myself, "funny place to set up radar". The car door opened and the dome light came on (that was his only real mistake; I might well be dead had he removed the dome light bulb). I could see that the roof line of the car was awfully low, that the car was white. "Awfully small squad car" I said to myself. The driver stood up. seemed short, was definately white and fit. Maybe a body builder. Wearing a tight red/orange t-shirt. "Oh FUCK" I said to myself, because I KNEW. I never saw a weapon, I never really thought it through, but all the little clues I now recognize added up for me subconciously. And, even though it's been 35 years, almost, since I wore either a military or police uniform, and over ten years since I did any bounty hunting, really, I trusted my gut enough to act.
Not that there was much I could do. I threw my right arm up to shield my eyes and jerked the truck as hard as I dared toward the left lane (situational awareness, remember. I also knew there was nothing behind/beside me). As I briefly debated slamming on the brakes ("Bullet v. brick" was the question), the brick hit the righthand windshield (many truck windshield are divided). The new, trilaminate windshields are also quite strong. The "plastic" middle layer does an unbelievable job of keeping the thing together as a sheet. Even so, the projectile knocked about a 1" hole in the very bottom of the windshield, then put a deep depression in the center of it as it bounced/rolled over the top. The center half of the righthand windshield was completely opaqued, the rest was severely spiderwebbed. When I cleaned up I had little slivers of glass in my lap and hair, but my arm had gotten up in time to shield my eyes. My swerve left had kept the brick from hitting my side of the windshield.
That old brokedick truck was governed at 65, but had I lost another half-second adding things up (no headlights, parked on wrong side of bridge, size of car etc etc) I would have been driving a loaded truck at 65MPH with my eyes full of glass.
People- not just soldiers, not just cops- who do not possess situational awareness, who do not routinely, subconsciously do threat assessment- are the statistics found in the "victim" column. And the morgue.
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1. Islam and sharia are indivisible.
2. Sharia is barbaric, homophobic, violent, and inimical to the most basic Western values (including free speech and freedom of religion). (Yeah, I know: SEE: Irony 101).
ERGO: Islam has no place in America.
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Threat Assessment. - 
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