Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

I’ve been thinking about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn DC’s ban on guns. As someone who lives in DC and has in the past covered random, drive-by shootings and seen boys bleeding on the street become a routine part of the landscape, I am having a hard time understanding how more guns will make things better.

Before this decision, it was still easy to get a gun in DC, partly because it was easy to get one in neighboring states. DC is tiny, keep in mind. It’s an intersection, not a state. Now it will be even easier to get a gun. And who are the people most likely to be killed by a gun? Young people, without a doubt. What kind of a civilization knowingly encourages the murder of its youngest members?

I am starting to think that guns are like lightning in America. They fall into blind spots in our brains, for a lot of reasons, and we fear them less than we should.

In The Unthinkable, I tried to write an equation for dread--the factor that most influences our perception of risk. Our brain tends to weight certain factors in the dread equation more heavily than it should. So we fear airplane crashes more than heart attacks, for example, because airplanes seem more out of our control (a sense of control is a major suppressor of dread).

Guns seem more in our control--like driving. Even though cars and guns kill a total of 70,000 people per year in this country, we have a vague sense that they are under our control, and safer than they are. In America, this problem is compounded by emotion. People see guns as a God-given right, so restrictions on guns (unlike restrictions on, say, tobacco, another deadly product) feel more unfair. And unfairness is another factor in the dread equation.

I bet that if we assigned values to the dread equation, we would see that many Americans dread gun control more than guns.

That said, it’s worth noting that most Americans support gun control. But the debate is shaped--and the dread is alternately amped and suppressed--by the gun lobby. Why is the gun lobby so much more powerful than the popular consensus? Well, they have far more money than the gun-control lobby. And why is that? I am not sure. I’d suspect it has something to do with dread, once again. Where there is dread, there will be money. (See: terrorism.)

Why do more men die in floods? I just did a story for Time.com on this particular mystery. Year after year, far more men than women die in storms. And in this year’s epic floods, men make up about three-quarters of the fatalities, according to my latest count.

The upside is that men can learn something from women and do better.

A number of you have emailed me to ask for the news-you-can-use side dish to the TIME adaptation of my book. Unfortunately, TIME did not put this piece of the story online. So I figured it might be fun to summarize it here--and elaborate a bit.

1. Attitude:

It turns out attitude really does matter. People who perform well in crises and recover well afterwards tend to have three underlying advantages: 1) They believe they can influence what happens to them. 2) They find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil. 3)They are convinced they can learn from both good and bad experiences.

If you’re like me, you’re thinking: Yeah, right.

But we should probably consider these incredibly perfect and cheery outlooks as simply aspirational. Like all human behavior, they occur on a spectrum, and no one achieves all of them all of the time. Again and again, survivors have told me that their confidence in their own ability to shape their destiny helped propel them forward. And in any case, it makes sense to encourage this kind of outlook in yourself in your kids--especially because this kind of burning optimism is helpful even if no disaster ever strikes.

2. Knowledge:

The brain is amazingly malleable. We constantly underestimate it.

If you understand how you are likely to react to a disaster, you can learn to override your worst instincts. If you learn more about your actual risks--or the risks that scare you most--you will probably be calmer should something go wrong someday. For example, did you know that most serious plane accidents are survivable? Yes, it’s true. Of all passengers involved in serious accidents between 1983 and 2000, 56% survived. (Serious, for those of you who still don’t believe me, is defined by the National Transportation Safety Board as accidents involving fire, severe injury, AND substantial aircraft damage.) So now that you know that, you know that your behavior can make a difference. And now that you know that, you might have a better attitude (see no. 1) in the extremely unlikely event that your plane goes down.

3. Anxiety Level:

People with higher everyday anxiety levels may have a greater tendency to freeze or totally shut down in an emergency. That is not always a bad thing, as my chapter on paralysis details. But it’s a very common reaction, and it’s important to recognize this risk and override it if you need to...if, say, your house is burning down or your ferry is sinking.

As in regular life, if you can learn tricks to control your anxiety, you will probably perform better. For example, some police officers are now trained to do rhythmic breathing (in for four, hold for four, out for four) whenever their guns are drawn.

4. Body Weight:

The harsh truth is that overweight people move more slowly, are more vulnerable to secondary injuries like heart attacks and have a harder time physically recovering from any injuries they do sustain. On 9/11, people with low physical ability were three times as likely to be hurt while evacuating the Towers.

Once again, what helps us in regular life helps us in disasters.

5. Training:

By far, the best way to improve performance is to practice. Make a list of your biggest risks (try to use data to do this, not just emotion). Then think creatively about how to give yourself or your family a dress rehearsal. The brain loves body memory. It is much better, for example, to stop, drop and roll than to talk about stopping, dropping and rolling.

For example, we know that fires generally kill more people than all other disasters combined. (If you are poor or African American, your chances of being in a fire are particularly high.) So give your brain something to work with. Make surprise drills an annual tradition in your office or home. Take the stairs down to the ground--don’t just stare at the stairwell door. Create incentives so that people want to do this. For example, have the boss tell everyone they have to go. Have him or her explain why it matters (because your brain turns to mush in a real fire, and you often lose your eyesight because of smoke). And have him announce that the official meeting spot will be the coffee shop two blocks away, where he will buy everyone coffee and donuts. That way, you boost office morale at the same time, so you get something out of the experience even if nothing goes wrong.

I went to National Airport in DC this week to do a story for Time.com about the new TSA screener uniforms. I came away very mixed about the new look. On the one hand, if the screeners look more professional, they will probably act more professionally, and passengers will treat them better, leading to a magical, positive feedback loop.

On the other hand, making screeners, the face of homeland security, look more militaristic does not necessarily feel like progress. In other countries, the airport security staff wear tailored suits and ties. They look like Men in Black, not cops. There are lots of clever ways to do this, and I’m not sure more rent-a-cop outfits are going to get us there. But check out the photo or report back from your travels, and let me know what you think. 

I did the Diane Rehm show today, which was a blast. (Rarely do you get an hour of media time to talk about anything, let alone an obsession that you’ve been researching for years.)

But I wanted to share with you what one listener sent in by email during the show. I wish I could have said it half as well:

From Jerry in O’Fallon, Missouri:

“I spent over 15 years training airline pilots and flight attendants in emergency procedures. Here’s what I know: Everyone has a moment of panic. The trick is to move past that and begin to figure out where you are and what you should do now. And the best way to do that is to have lived this moment before--in drills and in your imagination. It’s not knowing what to do that will save you. It’s knowing that you know what to do.”