Today, I’ll share with you my experience of hearing actual gunshots in Brazil.
Let me tell you first, everyone, when you hear gunshots, don’t run away. So what should we do? I’ve heard real gunshots twice in my life. The first one may be about eight or nine years ago. I was at my Brazilian husband’s home. I was on a hammock on the veranda there and relaxed. I heard an explosive sound in the distance. It sounded like a firecracker. The sound was not accompanied by children’s shouts like playing.
Instead, what I heard was the adults’ running down a hill at full speed.
It’s really unusual…I thought. My husband’s house was located in a residential area, which is one block from the main slope street. Suppose someone comes down a hill and gets into this side street. Those who run from the main street can easily find me staying in a hammock because they are looking from the slope top. I was very much afraid that someone with a gun finds me and tells me, “Raise your hand.”
I thought it was terrible in a silence. What I did was wrapping myself with a hammock like a bug. Looking from the top, I thought that no one can find me in a hammock. Even if someone gets close to our veranda, just turn the hammock and roll myself down to the floor… I was thinking like that. Then, as I was holding my breath for a while, someone climbed the stairs and came up to the veranda. When I opened the shade, I found that it was my master who came up the stairs to the veranda! !
“Did you hear the sound?”
He asks me.
I nodded silently.
According to my husband, the thief had been chased by a police officer. A police officer fired at the thief, and the thief was caught at the bottom of the slope. Meanwhile, I had a lecture from my husband. What he told me was what to do if I heard gunshots.
The first thing you should never do is run away after hearing gunshots.
The reason is that in a gunfight, you’ll hit by tray bullets, so you shouldn’t run away by screaming. So, what should we do? When you hear the bang, you just lie down on the floor, like pushing up posture. You will be in a posture like crawling on the floor.
Or you can get your head lower, squat down, and hide yourself in the shadows of walls and chairs. In this case, it seems that there is less probability that people will hit the bullet.
Indeed, pistol bullets fly sideways in the air. Therefore, if the human standing position is parallel to the trajectory of the pistol’s bullet, the human is less likely to hit by the bullet.
A Japanese who had lived in Sao Paulo used to say:
If you hear a gunshot in a family restaurant in Sao Paulo, everyone seems to take immediately such a reaction, clawing down on the floor. Actually, I don’t want to get used to taking such reaction spontaneously. But if you’re in Brazil, you’ll probably get used to it.
Tomorrow, I will tell you about the another gunshots I heard in Brazil last January.
