The Brain Wants You to Be Afraid and Be Prepared to Fight

Almost every day the news brings us face to face with the death’s innocents. It would be difficult to imagine a more frightening scenario for a horror movie; yet, it has become our reality. The epidemiological evidence is clear: fewer guns lead to fewer deaths. The opposing response: we will become safer from people with guns when there are more people with guns. Demand has surged from an average of 1 million guns sold every month in 2019 to nearly 2 million each month in 2022. Gun deaths account for 53 to 61 percent (during the past three years) of all suicides. The typical person to commit suicide by gun was poor, white (although Hispanics are catching up), lacking a college education, and middle-aged. Even when people are educated about the dangers of gun ownership, they remain convinced that owning a gun will make them safer.

The principal reason someone will never give up their gun is fear.

Feelings of fear are probably the most important survival feature our brain has ever evolved. How does your brain decide to induce fear? This critical task is processed by a small almond-shaped structure, the amygdala, which lies deep within the bottom of the brain, not far from your ears. The amygdala receives information from many brain regions, your internal organs, and external sensory systems, such as your eyes and ears. The amygdala integrates this information with various internal drives, such as whether you are hungry or thirsty, or in pain; it then assigns a level of emotional significance to whatever is going on.

For example, when the amygdala becomes aware that you are alone and hearing unfamiliar sounds in the dark, it initiates a fear response, such as panic or anxiety. It then activates the appropriate body systems, the release of hormones, and specific behaviors to respond to the (real or imagined) threat. The amygdala also is activated by sensory stimuli that seem ambiguous or unfamiliar to us, such as unfamiliar sounds or people. In response to ambiguous or unfamiliar stimuli, we become vigilant and pay closer attention to what is happening in our immediate environment. If you were a dog, your ears would perk up. Your amygdala gathers as much sensory information as possible, compares it to what you already know, and then instructs other brain regions to respond.

Almost without fail, and regardless of the nature of the information gathered by your vigilant brain, the amygdala usually comes to the same conclusion: be afraid and prepare to fight. If a sensory event, such as a sight or sound or taste, is unfamiliar, or it sees that other humans are responding with fearful responses; your brain almost always assumes that the situation is potentially dangerous and should be treated as such. If everything is assumed to be dangerous until proven otherwise, you are much more likely to survive the experience and pass on your be-fearful-first genes. Thus, humans fear everything that is unfamiliar or not-like-me: we fear people who look or dress differently, unfamiliar places, unfamiliar odors, things that go bump in the night, people who stare at us for too long, heights, enclosed small spaces, dark alleys, unknown people who follow us, etc. You get the idea.

We all have witnessed the consequences of fear: we hide behind closed doors, we hide in protected or gated communities, we keep a loaded gun by every door and under the pillow, we hire bodyguards, we install security systems, and we build walls. Brains evolved to perform one primary function: survival of the individual and the species; fear plays a critical role in survival.