Has anyone here ever witnessed a shooting? [View all]

[Tommy_Carcetti]

And for the purposes of discussion, I'm excluding wartime combat and going to target ranges or hunting. I'm thinking more along the lines of homicides and attempted homicides.

The reason I'm asking is that, as I alluded to last week, there was a shooting at my office building. It was a murder-suicide where a husband came into the office next to ours, shot his wife and then shot himself. I did not actually see it take place with my own two eyes, but I most definitely did hear it. And given that it was heard and not seen for me left me with a temporary sense of uncertainty as to whether or not the shooter was still alive and on the loose, which was unsettling to say the least.

The shooter owned his gun legally and was a well-respected member of the community. He was far from a typical psychopath or a reprobate felon.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. I'm not overly traumatized by it, but I'm still rather bothered by it. I did hear two people's lives suddenly and violently come to an end, and that's just bizarre when thinking about in retrospect.

But for anyone else so unfortunate to have witnessed (either visually or audibly) such an event, what were your feelings? Was there a sense of fear? What was your first reaction? What was going through your head, both when it took place and afterwards?

I heard one of my co-workers remark that she couldn't get the sounds of the gunshots out of her head. For me, the only other time I've heard live gun-fire goes back to where I grew up, in a rural area where I would occasionally hear hunters shooting in the woods. This sounded different from that, though, and from what gun shots sounded like on TV--this was higher pitched sound, less of an echo or reverberation, like a "pop". It did sound a lot like firecrackers. But the craziest thing was, when I heard it, I knew it was gunfire and not firecrackers--I immediately thought that it was much more plausible that someone would be shooting a gun in our building than setting off firecrackers. Goes to show the crazy world we're living in, I guess.