rilee

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I used to work at a TV station in Ohio. On weekends, we only had an 11pm news broadcast. Not much happened on weekends, ya know? I worked Monday-Friday 9-5, but someone on the weekend shift quit, so I also had to come in at 9pm on Sat/Sun to work the 11pm news. It was brutal. I worked seven days a week, even if two of them were ~3hrs.

This was a particularly bad winter. One Saturday, we had a level 2 snow emergency: That means you should only travel if you absolutely must. Like, it's not uncommon for cops to pull you over in level 2 emergencies to ask where you're going and why. It is genuinely dangerous to drive in that much snow.

I told my boss as much, how I almost crashed on the way home at 12:30am after a news broadcast. I told him I would need to call off if there were a snow emergency again during a night snow.

He told me, point blank, "If you ever call me about the goddamn snow, I will take it as a call of resignation."

And that was that! The very next Saturday, snow fell again. It was a level 2, but would become level 3 by sunup. Level 3 means driving is literally illegal except for ambulances and snow plows. I stared out the window, watching the snow, and I had to make a choice.

"Will I die for this? Will I kill myself to keep this job?" I made $11/hr.

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The standoff with agents happened on Jan. 8, one day after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in south Minneapolis. Wooten’s refusal to comply with ICE was captured on video and posted to Facebook. 

The agents tried everything to intimidate the guard.

 “You can’t come back here, bro,” Wooten can be heard in the video saying to an agent wearing a mask and sunglasses. “I’m talking to your manager,” the agent said. Wooten responded: “No, you’re talking to security, I’m in charge.”

ICE left empty-handed. Wooten said he just stood his ground, “10 toes down.”

there is no safe and effective way to render someone unconscious. The only way you get unconscious from a punch to the head is hitting your head hard enough on the ground to get a major concussion/TBI. This does not result in waking up "a little woozy" some useful minutes to hours later, it results in brain damage. Any drugs which might do this are hard to get the dose correct, so you're as likely to not knock someone out or kill them as you are to send them gently to sleep.

Tasers do not knock you out. Again, the only way you can end up unconscious from a taser is head injury when your muscles all seize up.

The point though is they don’t kill FAST. Like not in seconds or even a minute or two. Not unless you hit the heart or sever the spine or hit an artery well enough to bleed out asap (cutting throats counts).

THAT SAID they do incapacitate somewhat more often than they kill, but it’s relatively unpredictable. Whether or not someone’s entire body freezes up in shock and malfunctions vs their adrenaline making it so they don’t even really NOTICE until they’ve lost enough blood volume to cause a mechanical problem vs being In Pain immediately…. those are all gonna depend on a huge number of inter-applicable factors that you can’t necessarily predict in advance. And even if the adrenaline part works you may still find that limbs or balance or whatever doesn’t work the way you expect, bc the stab wound had actually severed or otherwise impacted a muscle that was crucial for this action.

So while dude stabbed in stomach by Small Knife may - in a world where he will be taken to hospital and treated with modern emergency and ICU care - well survive, and even those who don’t have the above do have a varying chance of survival depending on luck, baseline health, and whether or not their intestines or stomach were kicked by the blade, stabbing someone in the stomach with a small knife is still LIKELY to make him curl up and fall over either immediately or within a short period.

Or he may be so hyped up it takes several minutes for it to slow him down.

Human bodies and injury are wild in a way: we are very fragile except when we aren’t and survive absolute bullshit; and also we are astonishingly hard to kill until we are made of glass.

So yeah, OP is partly right in that a paring knife is unlikely to be an insta kill on a human being of reasonable health and size, but at the same time that doesn’t actually mean being stabbed in the abdomen isn’t a life threatening emergency or that ON THE WHOLE, if you manage to stab someone in the gut even with a “small knife”, you have a good chance of putting them down ie making them no longer a problem for you.

And the fatality rate skyrockets where fast access to a modern Emergency Department isn’t available, so that doesn’t mean your characters can just shrug off a gutstab.

The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind. Especially when we don’t know what’s going on.

WE FUCKING WON !!!!!!!!!!!!