Russians Shoot A Muslim On A Train

This was a cool video, sent by a reader:

What the reader aptly noted was the way people walked away from the shooting, and what that indicated about their amygdalae. They assessed the threat in a logical fashion. They deemed it serious enough to get away from, but likely a targeted attack (or more likely an accidental discharge), and thus of less risk than, say, a Chechen Islamic mass shooter. So they walked, and didn’t run. Compare that to the recent viral video of crickets being thrown in a Subway car in NYC.

That is amygdala development. It wasn’t panicked, it calmly assessed, and then it made a calm, logical call, under conditions that an undeveloped amygdala would simply panic over.

Even the thinner kid is interesting. He doesn’t panic, or freak out. He doesn’t shoot if he doesn’t have to, though he gets his gun up just in case. It is a much more mature control than you would see with a gangbanger in the US, who is much more likely to spray and run. Even under stress, his amygdala is constraining his behavior within reasonable bounds.

I’d love to sit down with those guys for a drink, and see just what their stories were. Were they criminals? Gang members? Ex-military? Russian government surveillance tracking the Muslim, and pissed at being made and confronted? The shooter seemed to notice the Muslim looking at him, nod in a friendly fashion as if to deflect suspicion, and yet the instant the Muslim approached, he rose and drew his weapon instantly, as if he knew things were definitely going to get hostile.

I’d imagine two armed guys, their age, and that quick to pull guns, would be unusual in the Russian State absent governmental authority. Plus the guy who gets on as they get off looks strangely unsurprised to see a Muslim who was just shot in the face, making me wonder if another operator on the train radio’d ahead that Ivan just had an AD, and shot the target in the face, and he and Sergei would need somebody else to come on board at the next stop and assume command, because they now needed to get the hell out of there before the cops showed up. The guy who gets on glances over, almost purposely looking nonchalant, and immediately looks away and heads to his seat as if nothing was even slightly unusual. It was almost as if he expected what he saw. It is not impossible.

That shooting surely would make for a lively post-follow group debrief, especially given the Russian sense of humor about such things. “And then at 3:07 PM, Ivan accidentally shot the target in the face. At 3:08 Ivan handed of command to Vladimir, who took command of the target as he made his way to the hospital to get treated for the gunshot wound.”

What is interesting is I do not think all of those people in the background were hardened combat vets. Rather they were people who have just lived in a nation that has not had an artificial glut of fantasy resources conjured out of thin air courtesy of a ballooning national debt. And as a result, their amygdalae had developed normally, and retained their functionality.

That is normal. Literally what you see among the left in the US today is a horrible deformity of the most vital structure to perceiving reality and adapting behavior to it. When the time comes that the amygdala is needed to survive, I would not expect them to come through it in one piece.