Decision-Making Under Stress—19 Factors to Consider
When confronted by a criminal or terrorist deadly force threat, human performance experiences extreme stress, affecting the potential victim’s self-defensive cognitive, physical, and emotional ability.
[ Read the SemperVerus article, Chart: The Spectrum of Potential Threat Personas in Self-Defense and Church Security ]
Police veteran, founder of Critical Incident Review, and use-of-force expert Jamie Borden, explains in his book, Anatomy of a Critical Incident: Navigating Controversy, the many critical factors that must be taken into consideration when evaluating police officer behavior in these highly complex encounters.
[ Read the SemperVerus article, The 5 Elements of Self-Defense Law ]
Law enforcement officers are the book’s target audience, but the following split-second decision-making elements excerpted from the book also apply to responsibly armed self-defense citizens and church security team volunteers facing life-and-death conditions. Where the word “officer” is located in the book, it is replaced with [defender] in this excerpt:
[ Read SemperVerus articles on the topic of CHURCH SECURITY ]
• Tunnel Vision — The phenomenon where a [defender] becomes narrowly, visually focused on a specific threat, potentially missing other critical elements of the situation.
• Auditory Exclusion — A temporary inability to process or encode certain sounds, often due to high stress, which can lead to missed commands or critical background noises. This is not an individual going deaf; rather just not encoding or filtering the audible stimulus, affecting the ability to recall later. The question becomes: not was the sound audible in the evidence, rather, was the sound perceived or heard by the [defender].
[ Read the SemperVerus article, Concealed Carry Daily Prayer ]
COGNITIVE OVERLOAD:
Mental illnesses are common in the United States, affecting more than one in five US adults (57.8 million in 2021), according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Estimates suggest that only half of people with mental illnesses receive treatment. 
